We Stand on the Shoulders of Giants
Listen not to the naysayers who would ruin the opportunities of the future by not understanding the lessons of the past.
There's been a lot of hoo-ha lately about the perils and pitfalls of Artificial Intelligence. Last week we had an open letter published by a who’s who of tech luminaries calling for it to be stopped entirely and this week we’ve had all sorts of commentary around Goldman Sachs’ estimation that 300 million jobs will be lost of degraded over the next ten years due to AI.
The gist of it the conversation is this: AI is happening at too fast a place. It is becoming human-competitive at too many general tasks. It’s a spreader of misinformation and untruths and is here to take our jobs.
Scary stuff, and although these fears are genuine (and should be addressed where they can) it should be stated that they are also misguided. For while many cross-industry pundits have convinced themselves that the sky is falling down and that Skynet is at the door these fears are in large part misplaced.
Now I'm no dystopian (funnily enough the person behind Europe’s first Generative AI consultancy does not believe that AI will end mankind), not least because the computing power alone needed to expunge the human race would be impossible to generate without someone noticing. But even before we get to such paper-clip-laden apocalyptic scenarios, common sense and basic history suggest that AI is much more likely to generate more jobs than it will rid us of in the long run.
This is because whilst I’m no dystopian, I’m no utopian either. I don’t think there is a job-free promised land on the other side of that AI adoption curve. In fact, much of the drudgery AI rids us of will only beget more drudgery as new jobs appear out of the woodwork (brace yourselves for the mountains of fact-checkers on the horizon).
This is alluded to in the Goldman Sachs report itself: “The good news is that worker displacement from automation has historically been offset by [the] creation of new jobs.” But it is not only tedious work that technological change both giveth and taketh — if one thing has proven true time and time again it’s that technological change also democratises and creates more creative jobs too.
Now to be clear: this does not negate the argument that we should not care when a skill is unlearnt by mankind — for this is patently a net loss. But we must ask ourselves whether or not such a skill is needed to be known by so many, and if it is not something that can be kept alive in other forms whilst still allowing us to flourish as a species.
A good example would be to look at typesetting. Typesetting was (and is) a fine craft yet it serves as a good example of a labour skill’s demand imploding upon the advent of a new technology (in this case the adoption of desktop computing & in particular the Apple Mac).
Typesetting was a profession wherein only a select few were able to lay down and print the written word in the way that was deemed correct. Yet overnight, thanks to technological change, everyone with access to the right software was able to typeset to their hearts content — enabling almost every modern-day job in the process.
At an enterprise level, this was clearly something of a revolution. But it must be also noted this act of creative destruction paid dividends in the way of design and the arts too. If you are someone like me with an interest in typefaces, this need not be explained, but for those who do not this article from The New York Times elicits the point well enough:
“Because of the spread of personal computers and laser printers, hundreds of new designers have entered this arcane field during the last decade. They have invented scores of new typefaces, known as fonts, and revived unused classics.”
That was some 30 years ago, and since then we are not talking about hundreds of designers but hundreds of thousands if not millions who are innovating their craft at both a speed and scale unseen in the previous hundreds of years of typesetting.
So without sacrificing the craft of typesetting on the altar of technological progress, much of the typeface we know and love today would not exist — nor would the more accessible and reactive typefaces of tomorrow for that matter.
But wider than that, typesetting has evolved from a craft known by a select few into a cornerstone skill of hundreds of millions of routine jobs around the world, all of whom have honed it in their own ways which have led to greater innovations — all the way through count to spell-check to AI-assisted writing tools — in the process.
The cumulative nature of technology can not be stressed enough in this regard. We stand on the shoulders of giants, and each technological layer we add into the mix only presents more opportunities for innovation and invention. In the wake of Generative AI, this will be no different.
We know this because we are seeing this already. Copywriters can now write entire worlds into existence and designers can bring their visions to life in seconds via prompts. These are clear improvements on these jobs — not only in terms of time but also in terms of outcome. In the space of weeks, we are seeing entire industries, equipped with their own film festivals, popping up as a result. It is clear then that the intersection of technology and creativity creates more opportunity for divergent outputs in the long run and that fears of anything otherwise are likely to be not drastic as these Chicken Littles would have you believe.
My point is that while we must of course concede with the doomsters and gloomsters that many, perhaps millions, of jobs will become obsolete over the years, we must also remind them that that does not mean that hundreds of millions of other (often better, more creative and fulfilling) jobs will not replace them.
In the grand scheme of things what we must remember is that while there are some who still lament the loss of the leech collectors, the knocker-uppers and the alchemists, most I would wager do not.
If you would like to ensure that your company is on the right side of history and is ready to harness the creative opportunities presented by Generative AI. Get in touch with our founder at elliot@acquainted.studio.
