Why A.I. won't eat jobs!
The fear of A.I. / LLMs taking away opportunities is everywhere. But all this fear overlooks the important point about how businesses work.
Businesses (generally) have the incentive to spend more money, as long as they generate good returns by spending more.
Hence, businesses (in the long term) wouldn't be laying off people just because LLMs have made everyone more productive.
Why?
Lets understand with an example,
Company A has 10 employees, and now with LLMs, 1 person can do 10x the work, so does that mean the remaining 9 employees are redundant? Yet, this? Company A would be stupid to lay off the other 9 people.
Because at least one of their competitor won't lay off the other 9 people, but instead use the existing 9 people, each doing 10x the work now (with LLMs), and further expand their business.
So, this Company A has no choice but to keep those other 9 people and do more for their business; otherwise, their competitor will eat away their business.
Elaborating (with 2 domains)
1. Marketing
Here is what marketing looked like,
50 years ago:
- ads
- news
- billboards/hoardings
20 years ago:
- ads
- news
- billboards/hoardings
- blogs
- graphics
Today:
- ads
- news
- billboards/hoardings
- blogs
- graphics
- short form videos
- long form videos
- newsletters
- podcasts
- (god knows what else)
Our marketing stack grew by a factor of 5x? (maybe 10x?) over the past 20 years, and this has become the new baseline today!
2. Software
Software will explode (expand at an even faster rate) because of A.I.
There are a lot of places where certain kinds of software is very valuable, yet it is not being created because the potential returns generated are very low compared to the cost of building and maintaining.
It requires a lot of capital (time & resources) to build and maintain software in those niche industries/places.
As software gets easier to build, Software will now start penetrating all these niche segments where until now, it wasn't feasible.
Here are a few examples,
- 3.D. software. Building software for AR/VR is very costly today, but the use cases are tremendous.
- Smart devices (not the kind which companies are forcing onto everywhere), where there are so many good, valuable use cases.
- Robotics, which again is very expensive partly due to the hardware, is also a domain where software has so many use cases.
All of these domains are waiting for breakthroughs, so they can expand to the masses. More and more software will be created when creating software gets easier.
Concluding
If you freeze your stack at the current level, you can fire most of your employees and replace them all with agents. But, you cannot, since your competitors won't, so you cannot take the risk of falling behind!
You can now do 10x marketing? So can your competitors. You can now create 10x software? So can your competitors.
And if everyone is creating 10x software/design/videos/marketing, then this 10x becomes the new baseline!!
A.I. will shift the baseline for businesses to 10x/100x of their current state. And if everyone is creating 10x software/design/videos/marketing, then this 10x becomes the new baseline!!
Surely, there will be a tough transition, and all of us will need to do more, but it won't eat away everything. There will still be opportunities, just in a different form than today.
The only case when all of this becomes worthless is if we attain true A.G.I., because at that point, nobody truly knows what is going to happen.