Why AI Actually Won't Take Your Job

And today we're taking on a topic that is just about as fraught as anything in artificial intelligence.

That is, of course, the question of job displacement.

Every day, there is some new story about a company reducing its workforce, blaming AI, at least in part, or some study which shows all the jobs that could be replaced by AI.

And it's not like Americans are particularly comfortable with the state of the economy already.

Now, I want to make clear that my argument this episode is not that we shouldn't be concerned at all about jobs.

My argument is that in general we're having the wrong conversations about it.

So let's talk about a few reasons why will AI replace all the jobs is the wrong question.

The first problem is that it sort of acts as though white-collar jobs are the only category that matters.

Now, white-collar jobs are a big part of the total US workforce, and it is absolutely true that one of the reasons that this particular wave of technology-driven job displacement is hitting people so much differently.

Frankly, most of the previous tech disruptions that we've experienced or that we've had in our history have hit blue-collar and physical jobs first.

The fact that AI is, on the other hand, coming first for white-collar jobs is a real reversal of that trend with some fairly big implications.

White-collar workers are proportionally more economically well-off and by extension politically enfranchised, which, to be clear, is not me saying that that's a good thing, it's just the way that it is.

And so the potential for backlash and politically potent backlash to AI, I think, goes up.

And yet still it's very clear that one of the things that's happening with AI is that it's reminding people that white-collar knowledge work type jobs aren't all that's out there.

In fact, it's kind of exposing a little bit at least that the pipeline to white-collar jobs do really well in high school, get into a good college, go massively into debt for your college degree, make it all back with your nice white-collar job, was broken before AI ever came along.

College is too expensive and didn't translate well enough into high-earning jobs in general to justify its cost.

That was a system that was already on the fritz even if AI ends up being the straw that breaks the camel's back.

You can see already in the early days of AI that its impact in knowledge work is causing people to reevaluate the very fundamentals of which types of jobs they aspire to.

That process could lead us into different places where the desiccation of certain categories of white-collar jobs, while impactful, is also mitigated by the shifts that people are making.