We overestimate AI’s impact in the short-term and underestimate it long-term
Solitude is not loneliness + clear(er) communication (Issue #281)
Are you worried that AI might someday take your current job?
I am, a bit. I run the Content team at Medium, which means we do a lot of writing in various forms — particularly writing marketing copy, one of the main use cases for LLMs like ChatGPT. But also? Like a lot of the claims around tech trends, it feels like hype. Who profits from replacing workers with AI? Big tech companies, for one, who are also building or investing in a lot of these tools, and thus behind a lot of the hype.
(I also happen to believe that meaningful writing requires humanity but that’s a conversation for a different newsletter.)
So how real is the threat AI poses to human jobs? The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics just put out a report on how AI will impact long-term job growth, and their answer is: It depends! They predict “occupations whose core tasks can be most easily replicated by GenAI in its current form” (like medical transcriptionists and customer service representatives) are likely to be affected, but also that employment in professional, scientific and technical services will rise 10% over the next eight years. “Although it is always possible that AI-induced productivity improvements will outweigh continued labor demand,” the report laments, really wringing its hands, “there is no clear evidence to support this conjecture.”
On Medium, writer Ignacio de Gregorio thinks there’s no chance AI will be taking any jobs in 2025, but for a different reason: cost. He points out that reasoning models are still highly inefficient, energy-wise, and running them at the scale we’d need to replace humans is still far too expensive to make sense.
If that’s cold comfort, maybe AI pioneer Joe Procopio’s thinking on which jobs AI could replace will cheer you. “It’s not how good you are at AI,” Procopio writes, “It’s how good you are at everything AI shouldn’t be doing. Which is a lot.” For example, what makes a great salesperson or software engineer isn’t about mastering rote tasks (which AI can do), it’s about making smart decisions in context. In other words, AI will bring with it new opportunities. Enrique Dans, writing about the same BLS report, agrees: “technological innovation has never been a unilateral force of job destruction.” Feeling better?
I like Rita McGrath’s framing that the question about AI and jobs is likely to be another example of Amara’s law, that “we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short term, and underestimate it in the long term.”
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🔎 What else we’re reading
- Solitude and loneliness aren’t the same; while we investigate the “loneliness epidemic” we should resist demonizing people who choose a solitary life. (Bella DePaulo in Fourth Wave)
- You’ve probably never known anyone who’s had measles, but it remains one of the nastier viruses we know, highly contagious and easily spread, which makes outbreaks like the current one in Texas (146 cases have been identified as of last month) a real cause for concern. (René F. Najera, MPH, DrPH in Microbial Instincts)
- I have no way of knowing if this will be of any interest to you, but I thought it was extremely cool: A walkthrough of how to make your own electric guitar pickups. (Riccardo Di Sipio)
⚡️ A wee lil’ bit of practical wisdom: on clear communication
When you have something new to explain to someone, you can make sure you’re being clear by anticipating leak points — how might your message be misunderstood, and how best can you tailor it to the person (or people) you’re talking to by adding relevance, examples, or exploratory questions? (Andrea Belk Olson)
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Edited and produced by Harris Sockel & Carly Rose Gillis
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