In addition to the cost and effects derived from its development, the biggest concern about the future of AI is knowing the impact that this technology will have on the labor market around the world. In fact, we are already beginning to see the first signs: it may not take away our jobs in the short term, but that’s it changing the way we work.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been interviewed by Fareed Zakari in the cnn and has told his vision of how AI will affect the future of employment. To describe the scenario, Nadella uses a phrase that can seem almost cryptic until its meaning is known: “The fallacy of the fixed amount of work and the lack of imagination prevent us from moving forward.”
The fallacy that stops us. Nadella calls it the lump of labor fallacy. It’s an idea widely studied and argues that there are a certain number of tasks to be performed. Employment is defined by these tasks: there are those who build houses, others put pipes, others cables, other furniture, etc.
If a machine (or an AI, in this case) automates one of those tasks, fixed quantity of work theory defines that a human has one less task left to do. That is, that job would have been destroyed. For Nadella, that calculation fails because it does not take imagination into account.
The typist apocalypse. The CEO of Microsoft gave a fairly descriptive example of how this theory falters in the face of technological advances: “Imagine that in the early 80s, someone said to you: “You know what? Three billion people are going to wake up tomorrow and start typing. “We would have said: and why does the world need three billion typists?” joked the company’s top executive who, according to the CEO of Perplexitybuilt the concept of office work to sell more software and was mainly responsible for the computer implementation in companies.
“In the last 40 years, the entire knowledge work economy was created, and all of us have worked in it in different roles,” Nadella concluded. That is, the CEO believes that the future of employment cannot be assessed from the perspective of current labor or work organization needs, because in the future, the needs of companies will be different and the roles of employees will also be different.
The fact behind the anecdote is real. In 1980 there were almost a million typists in the US. Today it is a profession that is almost extinct. And yet, office employment remains more active than ever. He just changed the way he worked. Nadella bets that something similar will happen with AI.
The process of change. We are already seeing this change in the way of working in some sectors such as software engineers or in the lawyers. “What it means to be a software engineer is changing,” Nadella said. Creating a document and creating a program have become, “to some extent, the same task”: enough ask the AI agent appropriate.
This change is already noticeable outside of computing. In the legal sector, some firms treat AI as a quick but unreliable intern. And lawyers, increasingly, as their AI supervisors. Nadella states that: “Our ability to discern what a human does with the output of AI will be the new quality we value.” The value is no longer in typing quickly, but in know what deserves to stay and what to throw away.
However, the manager has no doubts about the difficulty that all of humanity will face to complete this change in the labor paradigm: “This process is going to have some changes and a significant displacement (of employment). Not everything is going to be rosy. But when we come out on the other side, I think there will be new jobs that we will value as human beings.”
Macrodelegation and microdirection. To explain day-to-day work, Nadella coins his own term: macrodelegation and micromanagement. “Each of us will become better at managing through intentions (madrodelegation) and will have the ability to direct it exactly where we want it (microdirection),” he declared in his interview with the cnn.
In other words, the role of employees will be that of conductor of the orchestra of AI agents. An employee would tell them what objectives to achieve, and would supervise that the results delivered by the AI meet that objective and are precise in their execution. That is, AI would not play a substitute role, but rather a collaborative one. “Does that mean that, in some way, the specialized systems engineer that we need to be able to build distributed systems in Azure disappears? No way,” stated the Microsoft CEO.
Nadella’s revolution. The manager closed his interview by pointing out one of the fears that Silicon Valley is stirring: that society does not accept the change implied by the arrival of AI and this process of job displacement. There Nadella draws a historical reference.
“Revolutions are great, as long as there is a reaction.” The CEO prefers an orderly transition, like the one experienced in England in 1688in which the institutions did not lose control, to a violent rupture as the French Revolutionwhich made the heads of the country’s authorities roll.
Image | Microsoft
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