Flying cars for 2010
How old are you? Are you a millennial? A Gen-Z? A boomer? Are you old enough to remember the world without social media? If you are, you likely lived through the golden age of early digitalization. It was a time of amazement at ridiculously slow early versions of current technologies. There were sketches of future revolutions at every corner. There was also a long list of crazy predictions. Those tube-shaped MP3 Walkmans that could barely handle a dozen singles. There was the MSN wizz song and the first dysfunctional chatbots. Then came Facebook and other social media platform and faster internet followed. Our ability to gather quadrillions of octets of data grew, and our inability to interpret them grew even faster. I have trouble saying how much I miss this era. When there were no algorithms to hook us on infinite scroll down. Where we were waiting for the next morning to hear the news. And where Russian information warfare was nothing more than a few grey-looking Potemkin dudes saying that Liberalism was the decadence of human beings. I guess we all are nostalgic about our childhood. Yet I do believe I lived in the last generation before the great disruption. Yes, I called my buddies on their home and shyly asked their mom to pass the phone. I spent hours with no screens doing nothing but … just nothing actually, with my best friends.
The explosion of the amount of data led to the irresistible temptation to build algorithms. Now that we hit a treasure trove, let’s make sure we take profits. Here lies the mother of all Homo numericus logical fallacies. The more we think we know about the past, the more we believe we’ll understand and predict the future. In a complex, interconnected system, this is just not true. Worse, the more connected we are, the less predictive capabilities we have. The financial markets are one of many examples of our terrible track record at predicting anything. Information propagation can create devastating cascade effects and make every single Nobel in economics look like a fool. I mean, most of them do voodoo magic anyway but that's a story for another day.
Still, we train gigantic neural networks on decades of digital data. We believed this would create artificial intelligence to replace humans in most tasks or at least enhance human capabilities. Unless you’ve been living in a remote mountain in some -Stan ending country, I believe you heard of ChatGPT and large language models. It is 2024, and AI is just not the type of disruption everyone was expecting a few decades ago.
What’s your job?
The panacea for most undergraduates in developed countries is to work in a big corporation, large tech firm, or government office. I know, the last generation is a bit more allergic to paternalistic authority, but still, most prestigious universities send their best elements to one of those three categories. They do jobs that are often so bizarre that they can't be explained to some random eight-year-old kid. I call it the IBM syndrome, referring to the giant snail IBM became in the late 80s. These jobs are abstract cogs in self-destructing bureaucracies. Large organizations don't need anyone else to fail. They are absorbed by their own inefficiencies. Terrible processes and layers of abstraction obscure the original objective : providing good service to a citizen or a client. AI won’t cut your hair or clean your nails. It may actually just destroy those weird middle layers we’ve been building on top of each other for decades. PowerPoint makers, bullshit consultants, and arrogant namedroppers will have some tough wake-up calls. They should start thinking twice before sending their kids to prestigious and expensive business schools. Needless to say, most MBAs are silently waiting like lambs to be shredded by the AI sword. They are the kings of the middle layers.
Here comes my heuristic of AI disruption on the job market. If you want to know which jobs are going to be slashed by the fairly incompetent and naive AI algorithms we do have at our disposal, look for the jobs with all the following characteristics:
You can’t explain them to an eight-year-old (Process analyst at McKinsey, chief revenue officer)
They involve limited or no back-and-forth chats, natural exchanges or interactions with other humans (A bad marketing consultant mostly sending PPTs)
They are not client-facing (Almost everyone at the bank, except some tellers, a few traders, and a few salespeople. The most vulnerable is the arrogant dude drinking beer after work in the finance district talking in an unknown language even if it’s your mother tongue)
People speculated about what the world would be like in ten, twenty, or thirty years. In the sweet 1990s, we were told robots were to help us with daily tasks. They would cook us the best meals and give us the best haircuts. Flying cars were going to be a killer innovation. The AI revolution should look like the latest version of a sci-fi movie. Competent robots were expected to free us from daily struggles. This would enable the whole human race to live up to its full intellectual and creative potential. How wrong we were. As I am writing those lines, the safest job in a developed economy is literally those AI were supposed to kill in every utopia. Barbers, cleaners, cooks, waiters, and bartenders may be more looked for by employers than business graduates with obscure skills and the great capability of calculating the market size of green t-shirts in Southeast Asia.
Now, it is 2024. The current versions of AI are about to severely disrupt those we thought were the least vulnerable. This includes people with expensive suits and long job titles. In fact, they don't know it yet, but they are about to get crushed like a turkey on a Thanksgiving dinner. And, my dear reader, I do think we are not ready for that.
Be a barber.
Be a cook.
Be a craftsman.
Be a reader.
Be a lecturer.
Be a human.
Don’t say headcounts when you can say employees or team members.
Don’t say EBITDA when you can say cash in hands.
Don’t say bandwidth when you can say time.
Don’t be an MBA.
Don’t be a consultant.
Survive the AI shock.
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