How fast can AI change the workplace?

This past week the internet became radicalised about the progress of artificial intelligence by, appropriately enough, an online essay with an assist from AI.

- Ross Douthat

In his viral piece “Something Big Is Happening’, Matt Shumer compared the current Al moment to the early days of Covid-19, when people didn’t realise how completely their world was about to change.Except this time, instead of a virus, the agent of transformation is a technology increasingly capable of replacing white-collar workers en masse.

The essay offered a reader-friendly (AI-shaped pieces are very reader friendly!) explanation of what the people driving the development of artificial intelligence have believed for a while. On the way to hopefully utopian outcomes — amazing cures, growth beyond our dreams — AI may put a lot of people out of work in an incredibly short amount of time. Imagine the effects of automation and outsourcing on blue-collar labour, except inflicted on the professional class and compressed into just a few traumatic years.

People need to understand the part of this argument that's absolutely correct: It is impossible to look at the AI models we have now, to say nothing of what we might get in six months or a year, and say that these tools can’t eventually replace a lot of human jobs. The question is whether people inside the AI hype loop are right about how fast it could happen, and then whether it will create a fundamental change in human employment rather than just a structural reshuffle.