I'm a Product Leader in enterprise Generative AI. An IIT Bombay alumnus, I work at the intersection of product strategy, AI innovation, and enterprise delivery.
There will be no AI jobpocalypse.
The story that AI will lead to massive unemployment is stoking unnecessary fear. AI — like any other technology — does affect jobs, but telling overblown stories of large-scale unemployment is irresponsible and damaging. Let’s put a stop to it.
I’ve expressed skepticism about the jobpocalypse in previous posts. I’m glad to see that the popular press is now pushing back on this narrative. The image below features some recent headlines.
Software engineering is the sector most affected by AI tools, as coding agents race ahead. Yet hiring of software engineers remains strong! So while there are examples of AI taking away jobs, the trends strongly suggest the net job creation is vastly greater than the job destruction — just like earlier waves of technology. Further, despite all the exciting progress in AI, the U.S. unemployment rate remains a healthy 4.3%.
Why is the AI jobpocalypse narrative so popular? For one thing, frontier AI labs have a strong incentive to tell stories that make AI technology sound more powerful. At their most extreme, they promote science-fiction scenarios of AI “taking over” and causing human extinction. If a technology can replace many employees, surely that technology must be very valuable!
Also, a lot of SaaS software companies charge around $100-$1000 per user/year. But if an AI company can replace an employee who makes $100,000 — or make them 50% more productive — then charging even $10,000 starts to look reasonable. By anchoring not to typical SaaS prices but to salaries of employees, AI companies can charge a lot more.
Additionally, businesses have a strong incentive to talk about layoffs as if they were caused by AI. After all, talking about how they’re using AI to be far more productive with fewer staff makes them look smart. This is a better message than admitting they overhired during the pandemic when capital was abundant due to low interest rates and a massive government financial stimulus.
To be clear, I recognize that AI is causing a lot of people’s work to change. This is hard. This is stressful. (And to some, it can be fun.) I empathize with everyone affected. At the same time, this is very different from predicting a collapse of the job market.
Societies are capable of telling themselves stories for years that have little basis in reality and lead to poor society-wide decision making. For example, fears over nuclear plant safety led to under-investment in nuclear power. Fears of the “population bomb” in the 1960s led countries to implement harsh policies to reduce their populations. And worries about dietary fat led governments to promote unhealthy high-sugar diets for decades.
Now that mainstream media is openly skeptical about the jobpocalypse, I hope these stories will start to lose their teeth (much like fears of AI-driven human extinction have).
Contrary to the predictions of an AI jobpocalypse, I predict the opposite: There will be an AI jobapalooza! AI will lead to a lot more good AI engineering jobs, and I’m also optimistic about the future of the overall job market. What AI engineers do will be different from traditional software engineering, and many of these jobs will be in businesses other than traditional large employers of developers. In non-AI roles, too, the skills needed will change because of AI. That makes this a good time to encourage more people to become proficient in AI, and make sure they’re ready for the different but plentiful jobs of the future!
[Original text in The Batch newsletter.]
@karpathy We have a category in the market who does that right?
Knowledge bases for enterprises like Get Guru or eGain etc they maintain enterprise knowledge bases.
May be they can expand to developer KBs as well.
Will Siri face its Internet Explorer moment?
Default on every iPhone, yet far behind Alexa and ChatGPT.
Apple locks users into Siri—just like Microsoft did with IE.
Will ChatGPT become the Chrome of voice AI?
#AI#siri#ChatGPT#VoiceAssistant#Apple#TechRegulation
"She is dead....(laughed)...just write a cheque $11,000...She was 26 anyway...She had limited value" ~ Daniel Auderer, Vice President of the Seattle Police Officers Guild on the death of Indian student Jaahnavi Kandula.
Jaahnavi was raised by a single mother in Andhra Pradesh. She was set to graduate this December in the USA. She was killed in a road accident by a Police car.
Before giving lectures about Human Rights to others, the USA govt should look within.
Strict action should be taken against Daniel Auderer. We want Justice for Jaahnavi Kandula.
@TwitterDev Premium account activity APIs stopped working. I upgraded to Pro version and still it is not working. I just observed that you removed the documentation as well for account activity API. You only have account activity API docs for Enterprise version.
@Hootsuite_Help can you help me with getting access for developer APIs to manage tweets on twitter, reply to comments on tweets and also able to read messages, send messages
We are adding support for plugins to ChatGPT — extensions which integrate it with third-party services or allow it to access up-to-date information. We’re starting small to study real-world use, impact, and safety and alignment challenges: https://t.co/A9epaBBBzx
"ChatGen improved engagement on our online store to a great extent. Almost 15k-20k website visitors were conversing with the chatbot in a month. Not just the platform, the team was also excellent in guiding us till we optimised the chat flow."
#AI#Chatbots