There’s a lot of concern about what AI will do to jobs.
I think it’s less about losing jobs and more about jobs not being created at all.
I remember going to a conference around 20 years ago.
A speaker was talking about his team of analysts – people with Master’s degrees and PhDs.
This high-level team, he said, worked late into the night after markets closed, crunching the numbers and figuring out what they meant for clients.
It seemed like a big, expensive operation.
And I thought to myself – I do that now with a spreadsheet.
Each improvement opportunity I’ve seen has started that way – we’ve got a team doing something and it takes time and effort.
The team is too busy doing the work to try and do it better.
But once someone figures out how to automate or eliminate an activity those roles become unnecessary.
Or we set up smaller teams with the tools they need to get the job done as efficiently as possible.
New approaches and tools mean that jobs that you were hiring for yesterday just aren’t required today.
And the extension of that is eventually the tasks get done without supervision at all.
That does sound a bit depressing – is there always an inevitable slide from jobs existing to jobs becoming irrelevant.
But that’s also the nature of a dynamic, innovative economy.
The good news is that there is always a different job to do – other problem situations that need addressing.
The trick is perhaps always thinking about how you’re going to replace something done one way yesterday with a better way today?
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