Plenty of people believe that ChatGPT and other AI/ML technologies will wipe out swathes of white collar jobs. Not so fast.

We’ve had technology at our disposal for decades that could easily have eliminated vast numbers of jobs through streamlining, automation, and putting computation to good use. How have we responded to those advancements in reality? 

It’s not been through massive efficiency gains — there’s an estimated $2bn a year in admin waste in the US healthcare system alone — and your own experience of the workplace will probably confirm that the teflon-coated, ultra-modern, tech-driven enterprise is a myth. 

In reality everything is held together with duct tape, cludges, workarounds and human labour because replatforming is expensive, doing things the right way takes too long and is too hard, and we tend to stretch what we’ve got rather than build new stuff. That isn’t going to change overnight because we’ve got a shiny new object to play with. 

Neither have we been busy using technology to eliminate jobs. Quite the opposite. Instead we’ve just created ever more meaningless jobs to keep people occupied.

As David Graeber wrote five years ago in his awesome book Bullshit Jobs: “A YouGov poll found that in the United Kingdom only 50 percent of those who had full-time jobs were entirely sure their job made any sort of meaningful contribution to the world, and 37 percent were quite sure it did not…we can probably conclude that at least half of all work being done in our society could be eliminated without making any real difference at all.”

The reality is that people need something to do. And people also actually quite like having other people around. Furthermore, a manager without people to manage isn’t really a manager at all. There is no seniority without juniority, and every social organization, including a business, has a hierarchy whether we like it or not. 

What’s the first thing any new manager does? Build a team beneath them, whether there’s work for them to do or not. Once they have the people they can find work for them to do, obviously.

Rational business cases are no match for human nature. And fast moving technologies rarely deliver on their promise when confronted with slow moving cultures. A huge number of jobs are already meaningless and could have been automated away but haven’t. I’d be very surprised if ChatGPT made much of a difference — even though on paper it probably could.

#technology #ai #chatgpt

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