The Future of Work
Hello, I hope that you’re doing great. I was in Arizona last weekend for a big Forward Party event which was a blast. We have scheduled events for San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Raleigh and more coming up so keep an eye out!
This week on the podcast I welcome back Kevin Roose, tech reporter for the New York Times to talk about AI and the future of work.
Now, as you likely know I have very strong feelings about the future of work. My 2020 presidential campaign was built around the fact that automation and AI are going to gobble up tons of American jobs.
Since 2020, the labor force has actually shrunk by about 2.4 million workers:
It is a mystery why the labor force has shrunk; some are early retirees. Some are urban workers who have relocated someplace else and are doing something that doesn’t register as a job. Some are parents – particularly women – who have decided to focus more on their family.
Now, with ChatGPT, more knowledge work is being replaced. “A project that used to take 8 hours now takes 40 minutes” is the way one friend who runs a high-end consulting company puts it. “I’ll probably fire half of my people in 6 months.”
Another friend said to me, “I have to put in a half-hour of deep thinking to figure out the right prompt to feed the AI, but then after that I just got rid of a task that I was going to pay someone else to do.”
Another entrepreneur said, “I wrote a press release in less than 5 minutes. I fed the AI, got a template and then edited. It was a breeze.”
Unrelated to AI, tech companies have laid off more than 100,000 workers in a reset as their stock prices have gone down. One of the difficult truths is that a significant percentage – probably 20% - of workers in most large organizations are largely irrelevant to how that organization will perform.
Indeed, a lot of the headwinds have been caused by higher interest rates that have forced businesses – tech, banks, real estate, everyone – to have to generate real returns instead of taking free money and lending it, spending it, or basking in a sky-high stock price built on a rosy future.
The transition to more remote work is doubtless a force toward automation. If someone is remote, their job is one step closer to being replaced. The return to office work is highly uneven. Workers prefer remote or hybrid work and are making career decisions accordingly. Unfortunately, eventually so will employers.
For years now, the proportion of repetitive manual and repetitive cognitive jobs in the economy has been falling relative to high-end cognitive jobs. Repetitive jobs comprise 44% of jobs in the economy. This week, a University of Pennsylvania study suggested that AI will impact about 80% of all workers to some extent.
Kevin says in his book “Futureproof” “Be Surprising, Social and Scarce” and “Don’t be an Endpoint.” In our interview this week he comments, “I think work will get more social. At least, that’s the hope.”
I’ll confess to being pessimistic. The firms and CEOs I know are chomping at the bit to set AI loose in a way that most don’t understand. What’s ironic is that the impact will be most sharply felt in the most efficient environments first. The future of work promises to be a shrinking number of people in extraordinarily high-end jobs atop the AI and increasing numbers on the outside looking in. Limitless work can be done by AI, but who will that work benefit, and how will the average person experience the change? Any positive answer would require a rapid advancement of our society in a compressed time frame.
I ran for President on this in 2019 and 2020. Did I think it would be here in 2023? We don’t have that much time to evolve.
For my interview with Kevin click here. For my book on automation and the workforce ‘The War on Normal People’ click here. To move our government forward so that it can start to tackle this challenge in earnest, check out Forward.
