The world is abuzz with opinions about the implications of AI on the workforce. In a recent article by Matt Turner published in Business Insider, the question is raised once again.
The article title claims “the mediocre middle of office workers” will be replaced. But, as the argument progresses, there’s plenty of opinion on both sides of the fence. The essential claims are 1. AI will replace mediocre workers, those still learning their trade or just getting started because AI can outperform them, and 2. Since AI learns from the best of the best, an otherwise mediocre worker can up their performance by leveraging AI, thus competing with the experts.
The most rock-solid claim in the article comes at the end in a quote from Richard Baldwin, “AI won’t take your job. It’s somebody using AI that will take your job.” This part is certain. But what does all of this debate boil down to for the workforce of tomorrow?
To answer this we should assess it from two points of view: that of a company and that of a person in the workforce.
From a company perspective, all but the most benevolent of them will make decisions from a purely monetary standpoint. If a person with less experience and training can perform the same job as a more skilled person, but the company can pay them less money, this person will displace the more experienced job. Furthermore, one person will be able to perform more work than before and that will reduce the workforce even further. So, a company will dismiss both its experienced workers and some novice workers.
For individuals, however, this will create a market of unemployed novice workers and expert workers, all competing for the same jobs. That means the marketplace will have an unusually high saturation. Instead of a typical layoff cycle where people are competing with their peers, everyone is at the same level thanks to AI.
Let’s think this great leveling experience through a little further. In some cases, AI will not only level the playing field between novice and expert in a specific vertical, but across skill sets as well. Art is a good example. With AI generative art, people who learn to successfully master prompts for generating the art are now in competition with those who had previously created art the traditional way.
Between this massive talent pool and a reduced need for employees, the natural outcome will be lower wages. Wages will be at an all-time low. Remember, employers will need fewer people to do the same amount of work and the candidate pool will be larger than ever since experts and beginners and even people from outside the field can all compete for the work.
Ultimately, we are witnessing another major shift in work. Historians categorize these shifts in various ways, but essentially a major transformation in how people work defines a country’s economic condition. With each shift, the general populace must acquire new skills and change with the times or be left behind and destitute. The industrial revolution moved people from agricultural work to factory work. The information revolution moved many people from factory work to computer-based work. This next revolution will move people from diverse skill sets into a common skill set, using AI.
Essentially, AI will become the great leveler. It places everyone on an equal footing by forcing them all to compete in the workforce with the same demand for skill: prompt writing. Until AI matures and moves beyond interfaces requiring the user to interact with some form of written or spoken prompt, this is everyone’s new trade, at least for areas AI has extended into. Of course, with the more recent accolades of ChatGPT, the window of untouched specialties is rapidly dwindling. The economy is now dependent on how quickly people learn to employ AI technology.