When people ask me what artificial intelligence is going to do to jobs, they’re usually hoping for a clean answer: catastrophe or overhype, mass unemployment or business as usual. What I found after months of reporting is that the truth is harder to pin down—and that our difficulty predicting it may be the most important part of
In 1869, a group of Massachusetts reformers persuaded the state to try a simple idea: counting.
The Second Industrial Revolution was belching its way through New England, teaching mill and factory owners a lesson most M.B.A. students now learn in their first semester: that efficiency gains tend to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is usually somebody else. The new machines weren’t just spinning cotton or shaping steel. They were operating at speeds that the human body—an elegant piece of engineering designed over millions of years for entirely different purposes—simply wasn’t built to match. The owners knew this, just as they knew that there’s a limit to how much misery people are willing to tolerate before they start setting fire to things.
Still, the machines pressed on.
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Ai isn’t good enough to take many jobs
But it can be sold as good enough to credulous management, thereby still doing damage by getting people laid off in the short term.
There’s this famous quote about investing which goes: “the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”. I think that equally holds for the labor market. Just because you and everyone around you knows your job can’t be replaced by AI, doesn’t mean there won’t be an attempt to replace you which lasts long enough for you to lose your house.