Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) has said that while society is resilient and adaptable to significant technology-driven changes, he believes the writing is on the wall about the future of work and artificial intelligence (AI).
“There will be some classes of jobs that just go away and don’t come back,” Altman said in an interview with the Australian Financial Review.
“But studying history, it seems to me like people are extremely good at using new tools to be more productive and that human demand seems to be pretty limitless.”
Many are predicting that AI will resign a significant number of white-collar jobs to history. In the advertising and media industries, for instance, people are variously predicting that the roles of media planners and buyers, strategists, designers and more will be replaced by AI.
Outgoing WPP CEO Mark Read, for instance, has said that he was in “no doubt” there will be “fewer people involved” to do the work that advertising and media agencies carry out today.
“But I think there will be many many more and many many different things that people will do that will bridge that gap,” he said.
This week, the IAB released a report finding that some businesses are looking to reduce headcount but most are seeing the tech as a tool to boost productivity, improve decision-making, and create more strategic capacity across teams.
Henry Cowling, chief innovation officer of Monks, told B&T in Cannes that this was the worst time to be in advertising and that agencies could be a thing of the past.
“Today, I think the job of an agency is to help your client replace what you do with AI,” he said.
Altman said “AI natives,” essentially any generation now in high school, will fare better than any other generation as AI bites. He pointed to being a YouTube as the most-desired job among young Americans. New jobs will emerge that don’t seem like work to us today, he said.
He’s predicting a significant upheaval to the job market but also the relationship between people and the state.
“My read of history is that in about two generations, society can adapt to almost any amount of job change,” he says. “That is how the magic of capitalism works.”
He also believes that governments should start planning to introduce some form of universal income payments, but this would not be a solve-all idea. The idea of a universal basic income was en vogue among Silicon Valley’s elite a few years ago, as a way to reduce complexity in welfare systems and encourage innovation.
But for now, everyone needs to get a handle on AI tools—otherwise they’ll be swept away.
“I think being near the frontier of technology is good… So when I was a young person, the frontier felt like programming, and it felt like it was important for me to learn how to program, and I think that served that generation well. Right now, I think the frontier is these AI tools, and so the answer is to get really good at using those. That’s my tactical answer. Where that’s going to lead I don’t know. But it feels like a very good thing to do.
“On a deeper level… I had this one college professor who said ‘you’re going to learn a bunch of particular skills in college. You’ll learn to write, you’ll learn physics, you’ll program computers, whatever, and that will be useful to you, maybe. But the main thing is, you’re going to learn how to learn; the meta skill of learning something new.
“And then a few of you, not most of you, but a few of you, are going to learn a couple of things that really matter; how to figure out what other people want, and how to create value for other people. How to look at the world and figure out how to adapt to where it’s going.
“That always stuck with me. And I think that is the most important stuff I learnt.”
Let’s hope Altman has learned how to take a not-creepy press shot, too.
