A.I. Will Give You A Job
Some videos have been making the rounds recently, and I thought I’d contribute my two cents to the piggy. I have written about AI in the past, and I wanted to give my opinion a further spin: not only will AI not steal your job, it make you multiply your potential jobs.
AI will multiply the jobs
How many companies do you think are trying to shove AI into their operations? Maybe an easier question: how many companies do you think are not trying to shove AI into their operations? And how many do you think are successful? Do you really think that 34% of companies are making strategic decisions based on AI?
Odds are, the company you work at spends too much energy and money in R&D something they shouldn’t be R&D-ing, either because they don’t have the scale, the manpower or simply have nothing to find. Most will be diverting energy away from developing the solutions that actually matter to them, chasing ghosts that some podcast, panel or info-graph told them.
“Back when phones first started to have touch screens, mobile apps the future, right?
Certainly yes. The future, not the present. But, would you have developed a mobile app back then? Imagine spending hundreds of thousands on a Java applet for Nokia or Alcatel in 2009, just to be “ahead of the curve”. Ouch. Or imagine buying the first ethanol-fueled cars back in the 1990s to be “ahead of the curve”. Not a great investment.
Let’s put it another way: what makes a greater difference today to your run-of-the-mill pizzeria: having its own mobile app or having good reviews on Yelp, TheFork, and Maps? Yet, what do you think hyped pizzerias were investing in during the 2000s? I tell you what hyped pizzerias were not investing in: tomatoes and cheese.
People make terrible decisions when FOMO hits in, and companies are just people. Ok, but how will AI multiply jobs in the market? How can we not follow prey to the hype cycle, the FOMO?
During a gold rush, sell shovels
Sell shovels! Easy, right? Well, only if we understand what “shovels” mean now, in the age of AI (hint: it’s not prompt engineering). Option 1: naturally, be Nvidia and sell hardware. That’s shovels enough for AI. But not everyone can be a hardware manufacturer (not early Nvidia investor), what’s option 2? Be the cleanup crew.
Of all the companies that are currently giving AI an honest-to-God’s try, how many will over-invest, over-implement, and over-trust these systems? And how many will make horrible mistakes, compromising their operations, data, reputation or even their existence? And when they do, who ya gonna call? 👻
Be the cleanup crew, be the guy or gal they call when the fad’s over, the bubble pops and everyone’s scrambling about figuring out why they’re paying five figures fees to OpenAI. But don’t try to be the “data scientist” if you’re not a data scientist now, rather: be the lawyer they’ll need to fix the stupid contracts AI wrote, be the copy editor that’ll need to fix the brand personality that got trashed because AI took over the social media, be the designer that’ll do the rebranding after nobody knows what the company’s about anymore, for crying out loud, be the taxi driver that actually knows the best route after AI’s taken over Maps and can’t stop hallucinating ‘alternative routes’. Selling shovels has never been easier.
And even when industries panic, professionals will be scarce because we will have spent our last years de-professionalizing and despairing on the gloomy future, instead of teaching and becoming better experts. As always, practice makes perfect, we’re not saying simply “be better”, but keep at it, now more than ever the ones that keep at it long enough will surface and be thanked, for they will have not followed the fad.
When investing, the ones that short the bubble are not only better positioned to reap the burst, but also make the bubble ever so slightly less catastrophic. So now too, those who invest in their careers will reap the benefits when the AI bubble bursts, in addition to helping the whole industry recover faster. So yeah, short the AI bubble by becoming a better professional. 📈
