In bad news for humanity a problematic infestation of mindless drudgery called "jobs" makes no sign of abating in the near term and is universally feared to possibly increase from recently recorded levels.
1. Jobs are about delegation, ownership and accountability (and some might say, scapegoating). When middle managers replace humans with swarms of AI agents, they quickly see how "actually doing the job" is only a small part of it. Cf Meta's botched Project OT. (Not to mention Bullshit Jobs, where value creation is not a part of the equation at all.)
2. Only very recently have frontier models become capable of anything resembling full autonomy at reliable quality, and then only at very high cost. Because of #1, any time a job depends on reliably getting the task right, the bar for human replacement becomes very high. "Right 90% of the time, 100x faster" is not a sales pitch: it's a manager's worst nightmare, as the one who has to review a barrage of mistakes (cf AI burnout). So, best case for AI, any mass replacement in enterprise settings is only likely to come in businesses where the whole managerial structure is refit for much higher fault tolerance (ie layers AI management), and that in turn increases the number of review tokens exponentially, making it uneconomical at current cost/error levels. Worst case for AI, the "agents review agents all the way down" structure is intrinsically incapable of self-correcting to an acceptable bar at *any* token volume, at least with current architectures.
"Tara Balakrishnan note that 32 percent of respondents in 2025 anticipated head count reductions due to AI, yet only 14 percent reported reductions in workforce a year later"
I think a big part of this is good old comparative advantage. There are three broad buckets of tasks that AI can do way better than pretty much anyone else, so much so that it doesn't make sense to do it myself. There is no point in me trawling through the internet to find something I half remember reading once if ChatGPT can pull the source pretty much straight away, or with a few trial-and-error attempts. Then there's stuff I can do that AI cannot hold a candle to me on. I love skiing, for instance, and ChatGPT can give me no shortage of skiing recommendations. But it can't actually ski. There's an entire bodily-sensory world I have access to that it does not. At least for now.
But beyond that, there's a third, and potentially vast, other category: stuff AI can do better, but not so much better that it's worth getting it to do. ChatGPT could 100% make a better to-do list for me than I could. But I still make them myself because when I boot it up, I'd rather use it for the stuff it's really, really better than me at. That is especially important if you have business setups built around a limited amount of access to particular models, like Anthropic does. Even if you choose to allow unlimited use as part of your pricing, there's an opportunity cost to this versus the company that can allow users to optimise the hell out of a smaller number of very well AI-suited tasks.
I think a lot of this is basically downstream of the fact that one of the most fundamental human drivers is insecurity, and because jobs simultaneously serve as meaning-providing axis-mundi both *instrumentally* (because they are how we provide for ourselves and our families) and *intrinsically* (because they are components, sometimes, of how we construct our senses of self), we are just disproportionately attentive to any threat or implication that might render them fragile. See also: immigration.
How do you think any of the above may change (or not) as AI becomes more 'physical' with the deployment of robots? Seems to me that is the next big area of change but maybe I am just buying the hype machine.
In bad news for humanity a problematic infestation of mindless drudgery called "jobs" makes no sign of abating in the near term and is universally feared to possibly increase from recently recorded levels.
Couple of things:
1. Jobs are about delegation, ownership and accountability (and some might say, scapegoating). When middle managers replace humans with swarms of AI agents, they quickly see how "actually doing the job" is only a small part of it. Cf Meta's botched Project OT. (Not to mention Bullshit Jobs, where value creation is not a part of the equation at all.)
2. Only very recently have frontier models become capable of anything resembling full autonomy at reliable quality, and then only at very high cost. Because of #1, any time a job depends on reliably getting the task right, the bar for human replacement becomes very high. "Right 90% of the time, 100x faster" is not a sales pitch: it's a manager's worst nightmare, as the one who has to review a barrage of mistakes (cf AI burnout). So, best case for AI, any mass replacement in enterprise settings is only likely to come in businesses where the whole managerial structure is refit for much higher fault tolerance (ie layers AI management), and that in turn increases the number of review tokens exponentially, making it uneconomical at current cost/error levels. Worst case for AI, the "agents review agents all the way down" structure is intrinsically incapable of self-correcting to an acceptable bar at *any* token volume, at least with current architectures.
Another datapoint:
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/charts/ai-job-losses-fall-short-of-forecasts
"Tara Balakrishnan note that 32 percent of respondents in 2025 anticipated head count reductions due to AI, yet only 14 percent reported reductions in workforce a year later"
I think a big part of this is good old comparative advantage. There are three broad buckets of tasks that AI can do way better than pretty much anyone else, so much so that it doesn't make sense to do it myself. There is no point in me trawling through the internet to find something I half remember reading once if ChatGPT can pull the source pretty much straight away, or with a few trial-and-error attempts. Then there's stuff I can do that AI cannot hold a candle to me on. I love skiing, for instance, and ChatGPT can give me no shortage of skiing recommendations. But it can't actually ski. There's an entire bodily-sensory world I have access to that it does not. At least for now.
But beyond that, there's a third, and potentially vast, other category: stuff AI can do better, but not so much better that it's worth getting it to do. ChatGPT could 100% make a better to-do list for me than I could. But I still make them myself because when I boot it up, I'd rather use it for the stuff it's really, really better than me at. That is especially important if you have business setups built around a limited amount of access to particular models, like Anthropic does. Even if you choose to allow unlimited use as part of your pricing, there's an opportunity cost to this versus the company that can allow users to optimise the hell out of a smaller number of very well AI-suited tasks.
I think a lot of this is basically downstream of the fact that one of the most fundamental human drivers is insecurity, and because jobs simultaneously serve as meaning-providing axis-mundi both *instrumentally* (because they are how we provide for ourselves and our families) and *intrinsically* (because they are components, sometimes, of how we construct our senses of self), we are just disproportionately attentive to any threat or implication that might render them fragile. See also: immigration.
How do you think any of the above may change (or not) as AI becomes more 'physical' with the deployment of robots? Seems to me that is the next big area of change but maybe I am just buying the hype machine.