What the Future of Work looks like With AI
We're not running out of things to do any time soon.
Do you remember how you used to find information before Google? I used to scour the internet, using primitive search engines and listing sites hoping to uncover some nugget of wisdom. It rarely worked.
Before Google the amount of energy it took to look something up made it less likely that you would try. Then along came Google, and suddenly everyone googling the most random things. Why not? It just takes a few seconds. This is what I think about when the headlines try to sell that AI is going to take our jobs.
AI will make a lot of the work we’re doing today laughably easy to do. Things we used to charge for, things that took us days, will now take cents and seconds. But do you think that means we’ll run out of things to do? Google made a lot of library indexes obsolete, and created a flood of new opportunities. AI will do the same.
Think about the number of clicks you make on your computer in a day. It’s in the thousands. Each one didn’t take long, but I’m willing to bet you still sigh from time to time before you open your last notification. This friction, the same friction we felt to look something up, can now go away with AI.
There’s simply no need to deal with many of the incoming messages anymore. AI will do it. You can focus on the actions the message thread is trying to coordinate.
The next time you set up a process for procurement, there’s no need to train people, or document it. Just ask AI for a draft and have it ask each stakeholder for feedback to incorporate. AI will create the process. You can just procure.
Productivity increases have unintuitive outcomes. We think they mean that demand will dry up: How many shoes can you possible wear? But that’s not what happens. As supply increases we can be much more creative and do more interesting things: Sneakers are not collectibles as much as foot protection.
As employees become more productive we might hire less, for a while. But when we’re more productive, there’s more money to invest. And we need a lot more people for all these new ideas.
We’re never going to run out of problems to solve, or things we want. So the amount of work that to do will always increase, never decrease.
I can’t wait to have an AI army working for me. I’ll need to hire a lot of people to try out all of these ideas.