Dear Professionals, It’s Time to Stop Pretending AI Won’t Take Our Jobs

AI won’t only take “routine” jobs, and that’s ok…maybe

“About 1 of every 15 workers in the country is employed in the trucking business, according to the American Trucking Association,” proclaims the homepage of alltrucking.com. “These figures indicate that trucking is an exceptionally stable industry that is likely to continue generating jobs in the coming years.”

Considering that self-driving trucks are already on the road, this seems — at best — blindly optimistic. But while many educated professionals are willing to concede “routine” jobs like driving or burger flipping to AI, we share the same blind optimism when it comes to the staying power of our own work.

This is a mistake.

When the first machine age hit in the late 19th century there were no antibiotics, public sanitation was still a cutting edge idea, and 80% of the world couldn’t read. Most people were just trying to survive, few were in a position to prepare for how industrialization was about to upend their world.

The first machine age added previously unimaginable wealth and convenience to our daily lives, but it also wasted our rivers, took full advantage of the poor and oppressed, and set the stage for 100 years of labor wars.

Here we are on the cusp of the second machine age. We are better educated, better fed, and enjoy better healthcare than the vast majority of anyone in any period of history. And the machines are once again about to upend life as we know it — from jobs and social life to the functioning of our economy.

Will we be active participants in thinking about and creating this new world, or will be hold onto to a fading notion that somehow, magically our way of life will be safe?

AI is going to eliminate millions of jobs

This is inevitable.

Over the past week in our Understanding AI series, we heard from a group of professionals exploring the impacts of AI.

Chris Orlob from Gong.io shared a glimpse into the future of sales coaching with AI-powered analysis of 25,537 sales calls. It is impossible for any sales coach or manager to deliver this kind of insight. If a sales coach listened to 45-minute sales calls for 8 hours a day, it would take them about 9 years to comb through this data, assuming of course they take 0 vacation days and use their nights and weekends to actually deliver that feedback.

A sales coach is not what we typically consider a routine job. Sales coaches are valued, highly experienced, and well-paid. It’s hard to believe that a machine could potentially put them out of work, and yet…look at the data.

And Sales’ counterparts over in Marketing are hardly any safer. Marcus Andrews is predicting that we’re on the cusp of machines taking over things like content strategy and email marketing.

While graphic designers aren’t being put out of work by AI (yet), they won’t remain free from its impact much longer. Sam Mallikarjunan touched on how machines are gaining the ability to understand and categorize images. This shift will once-and-for-all remove image making from the sphere of the immeasurable.

And Google’s AI technology is already working on taking over the job completely, making its first (though admittedly creepy) foray into artistic creation.

We’re a little more comfortable with stories like the one shared by Robina Maharjan, who experimented with using an AI-based assistant to handle the tedious task of scheduling meetings. But just because we would prefer AI to only take on the menial, routine work does not mean that it will stay in that nice little box.

AI is putting us all out of work and there is nothing we can do to stop it, but is this really a bad thing?

Losing our jobs to AI isn’t a bad thing

When people say, “People need jobs!” what they are really saying is, “People need a way to earn a livelihood.”

Up until this point in history, the two were inseparable: If people were not working, value was not being created, and society as a whole suffered. We’re entering a time when this equation is no longer true, or it is at least a less balanced ratio.

In 1964, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech where he referenced his concern regarding the “triple revolution” — technological revolution, weapons revolution, and the human rights revolution. He was referring to a report written by a group of academics, journalists, and technologists.

The report anticipated a rise in automation that would result in, quoting Rise of the Robots here:

Massive unemployment, soaring inequality, and, ultimately, falling demand for goods and services as consumers increasingly lacked the purchasing power necessary to continue driving economic growth.

With 50 years between us and the triple revolution report, we can visualize this gloomy future with uncomfortable clarity.

We’ve seen the rise of unemployment and wage stagnation. And while it sounds crazy, we’re on the brink of seeing the jobs of 3.5 million truckers, and the millions more that serve the transportation industry, being eliminated. We’re a handful of years (months?) away from bots eliminating millions of customer service jobs.

The negative impacts of massive unemployment are so frighteningly believable that we would rather simply disengage from the discussion — but the negative is not the only option for our future.

The other side of the spectrum is much brighter — it’s a future where we all share in the value created by the machine laborers. Maybe that means fewer jobs and the rise of job sharing (a practice that has been in use for years in European countries to reduce unemployment). Maybe the future is shorter workweeks or basic income, and no one ever having to do a crappy job that they hate.

This is an uncomfortable thought exercise for most of us. The Protestant work ethic is so built into how we think about the meaning and value of our lives, that imagining a world of no jobs, or just less work, feels…somehow… wrong. But again, this can’t be an excuse for ignoring this possible future.

Of course, I’m painting two extreme ends of the spectrum. The reality will certainly be far more nuanced and is almost entirely unknowable. But at this moment, any version of the future is equally possible. And now is not the time to just “see how things turn out.”

What will you do about it

60 years ago, MLK saw automation as being inseparable from the core issues of the time. It still is. You cannot talk about human rights, climate change, income inequality, social justice, or globalization without talking about AI.

Today, it is the responsibility of every single professional, really every single person, to understand the implications of the second machine age and actively participate in creating a new future.

Stop hiding your head in the sand.

Stop pretending your job is safe.

Care about this conversation, it is the future and it is being created right now.

So, here’s your holiday reading list. Take that magical week leading up to the New Year to get up to speed on the implications of AI.

It’s important.

This new report from HubSpot is the beginner’s guide to AI. It’s the quickest way to get up to speed on the terms and the use cases. Learn how you’re already using AI and what’s coming next.

This is arguably the definitive text on AI and the future of work. Martin Ford walks through the many industries and “good jobs” that will be disrupted by AI and begins to introduce some potential paths forward in the jobless future.

This is Economist editor Ryan Avent’s call to imagine a new economy. It is equal parts gloomy and optimistic, realistic and idealistic. I’ll borrow his closing words to close this article: