We've all heard the doom and gloom news surrounding GenAI - it will take white collar jobs, AI will replace 95% of Marketing jobs, death of coding, the one person unicorn company etc. Most experts agree that this will take time and this isn't something imminent.
That being said most people seem to agree that in the near future a person with AI will take the job of a person without AI.
Sangeet Paul Choudary has an alternate take that AI will not take your job but it will take a chunk of your salary. Your ability to charge a premium for the skills you have are at risk and there is the potential that a more junior person with AI can do the work of a more skilled person.
He gives this really good example -
Up until the start of the twentieth century, axe-wielding was a high-skilled job. In order to be any good at logging, you needed to perfect the right angle of the axe swing as well as the grip on the axe, through years of practice, that developed both muscle and muscle memory.
The invention of the chainsaw changed all of that. Low-skilled loggers, who lacked the knowledge or the muscle memory to perform well, could now perform at a much higher level of effectiveness.
Uber is another example of technology allowing a lower skilled person take the job of a higher skilled person.
There is another disruption that Ethan Mollick talks about in his book Co-Intelligence. It undermines the hidden system of apprenticeship.
In a lot of the GenAI work I have been doing, I treat GenAI as a junior intern and have it do some initial work to produce a V1 of research / strategy etc. and then I work on it to make it better.
Similarly, a lot of the GenAI tools I see are definitely working on enhancing the work of SDRs, where I could reduce a lot of the manual work that they do today and thus have fewer SDRs. Similarly junior PMMs/Editors that might interview customers / listen to Gong calls to understand voice of customer can be augmented with GenAI.
If these 2 trends - fewer entry level jobs due to GenAI and a reduced need for highly skilled roles - does it remove the bottom rungs and the top rungs of the skill ladder?
This is a weird analogy, but imagine that Uber democratized cab driving and disrupted the highly skilled cabbie (think NY Medallions / London Black Cab drivers). So anyone that can drive can now become a cabbie (REALITY). BUT it doesn't stop here. Uber also introduces self-driving cars and so now most teenagers don't get a drivers license and don't know how to drive. So they can not become a cab driver because the bottom rungs disappeared.
So are we left with a bunch of average drivers doing a great job assisted by technology waiting for a day when the self-driving cars will take their jobs? Will people not strive to be experts because the average person next to them with GenAI is better than the experts?
Is this our future?