Possessing no Valued Vocation
Yell fire
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Every business that deals in words or numbers will be run over by AI
-Hans Kaspersetz
It will be hard to tell at first, of course.
Things will be normal. Same commute. Everyone standing in line to step off the train. Usual coffee pick up.
Same, “got any plans for the weekend?”
You will get up from your desk to get the usual 10:43 coffee. See a couple coworkers on the way down that you recognize. Raise a hand and say hi.
“Hey did you hear what happened to Company B? Yeah, They’re closing shop. I heard their business dried up. Went elsewhere. To that place using all that new tech”
You may find that your clients begin to call you less, or find out from someone else that they have begun to use a new vendor.
The loss of business becomes apparent. You call your clients.
You ask why.
“I hate to do this. You were always one of my favorites. It’s just that things are changing, and we need to try to keep up. It’s nothing personal.
You’re no longer able to give us better pricing/accuracy/speed/scaling/risk selection”
In a certain subgenre of scary movies worth their salt, there’s a part at the very beginning of the movie where the person about to be killed off 6.5 minutes later, realizes that something is terribly wrong.
And if it’s an effective movie, those minutes are filled with a creeping claustrophobia and an increasing sense of dread that this thing is happening and I cannot stop it.
Many companies and industries are at the beginning of those 6.5 minutes.
AI is going to run them over.
“Run over” is an appropriate order of magnitude euphemism for the changes coming from AI- both good and bad. Some companies will be run over from how much money they make from AI (I’m positively bowled over!) and some companies will be run over because they are, well, run over.
And right now, most people have only the faintest tingle over their shoulder of what’s coming.
Companies are already replacing workers with AI for certain tasks (a bunch of tech co’s) or requiring that employees prove AI can’t already do the task (Shopify) before getting (human) headcount to hire.
Not sometime in the future.
Not gee maybe it will happen someday.
It’s happening now.
But Otakar you’re such an melodramatic alarmist. You don’t understand the full picture. AI couldn’t possibly take over my job. My job is far too complicated, my industry way too much of a gentleman’s game for that to happen.
I’m an ant.
All this is happening whether or not I put words to paper, yell “fire” in a crowded theater, or go for a long walk off a short pier.
My favorite zombie book is Max Brooks’ World War Z .
There’s a part in the book that I’ve thought about often since reading it.
Society has collapsed, people are trying to cobble the pieces together again, and a call goes out for those people who have “useful” skills:
You should have seen some of the “careers” listed on our first employment census; everyone was some version of an “executive,” a “representative,” an “analyst,” or a “consultant,” all perfectly suited to the prewar world, but all totally inadequate for the present crisis. We needed carpenters, masons, machinists, gunsmiths.
The first labor survey stated clearly that over 65 percent of the present civilian workforce were classified F-6, possessing no valued vocation. We required a massive job retraining program. In short, we needed to get a lot of white collars dirty.
Data summary, comparison, extraction, and “couple years out of school”-level research reports.
Skills all the huge white collar sectors- business, law, consulting- look for new employees to utilise in the course of learning their businesses.
Skills all perfectly suited for the pre-AI world.
Required even.
Totally inadequate for what’s coming.
By some stressful first-person accounts, The Great Displacement (or whatever name the zeitgeist latches on to) is Already Well Underway.
There are companies that aren’t concerned or have no idea that their workforce needs to learn and adopt AI.
We have moved beyond the “innovation as Darwinian hedge” portion of the program and on to the “have to” phase.
For those companies that are beginning to realize, for whom the tingle over their shoulder is growing noticeable, if they don’t spend the resources (euphemism for money) on reskilling, adopting and integrating AI, they’re ensuring that whole swaths of their workforce will be relegated in the near future to possessing no valued vocation.
I recently gave a presentation to a group on the “The State of AI”.
Not my best title.
But deliberately anodyne.
I didn’t want to spook anyone.
No need to yell “fire” in a crowded theater.
About 200 people at the event.
We took a poll.
When do you think AI will completely automate significant aspects of your business?
1, 3, 5 years time? Or Never?
40% of the audience said never.
That’s almost half the people that were there.
Executives with decades of experience in their fields effectively voted for the idea that profound change was never coming for their industry.
Never is a trap.
It takes a certain level of persistence, somewhere near the border of willful ignorance and self-inflicted wound to say “That’s impossible”.
That will never happen.
But never happens all the time.
Don’t slow down.
I talk to companies early in their AI journey on a regular basis. Some know exactly what they need and how to get there; some want something with AI, just not sure what. Still others don't know where to start. They have to weigh the pros and cons of investing into building the infrastructure, or finding the right partner with the right knowledge to keep them relevant in this new era, so they don't get slaughtered in the first 6 minutes of the movie.