Mind Readings: Generative AI and Addition vs Substitution of Jobs

In today's episode, when we talk about generative AI, particularly in the context of jobs, the future of work and job losses, there's a few different ways to think about this. In the short term, for sure, companies that are purely profit focused, and you know, tightly focused just on net profit will absolutely look to cut uh headcount as much as they possibly can to increase profitability. Human beings are expensive. Employing people is expensive, and these corporations that the the dollar or the euro or the peso or whatever the unit of currency is, if they are hellbent on just making money, they will use AI as much as they can to get rid of as many people as possible. That's basically given, and that will cost some jobs.

Anyone who is in the AI space who is saying this isn't the case is not acknowledging reality. That is absolutely going to happen. It is already happening in some spaces. And in this particular instance, we are talking about the substitution of human effort for machine effort. The thing is, like you will find studies that reinforce pretty much any take on this, from you know, studies that say, hey, AI won't pack jobs at all, the future's rosy to apocalypse, the sky is falling, AI is gonna kill us all, right?

And then everything in between. But the part that we forget when it comes to generative AI in particular, is addition. As anyone who has ever run a business knows, especially in this economy, your biggest competitor isn't a named competitor. You're not losing out to uh the burger place down the street or the the bar or whatever. The biggest competitor these days for many businesses is no decision.

Right? You go in the CRM, no decision, ghosting, no action, customer doesn't show up, no customer. A sizable percentage of AI use is going to be in those no decision or no action cases. Instead of doing nothing, people who have ideas but lack skills can do something. And that something is pretty good.

Right? You can't play music. You don't know how to compose music. Would you hire a musician for $500 or $1,000 to write you a piece of music? Maybe for like a really important commercial production, but for like a blog post?

No. So you would choose to do nothing. In this case, you would say, well, I'll just use generative AI to make that. And so now you've made something. Is it great?

No. Is it amazing? Is it award-winning? Will you win a Grammy? Nope.

Is it good enough? Yeah, it's good enough for that use case. And that means more, more stuff, more content, more ideas brought to life. That in itself is not a bad thing, right? But it also creates economic opportunity.

Now, with generative AI, you and I are going to have way more content to choose from than ever before. There will be ever increasing demand for curation, for selection, for judgment, particularly human judgment, to find stuff that you want the most. You having a point of view about what is good and what is not good becomes valuable when there's just so much to choose from that people like, I don't want to do all the work. You tell me what's good. Right?

Newspapers, higher education, legacy institutions have not figured this out yet. And that's why so many of them are struggling. You know, colleges are saying our enrollments are dropping, and people don't understand the value of the education. Well, that's because you still operate as though education was something hard to achieve. You still behave like you're the gatekeeper of information.

You're not. Newspapers act like they are the gatekeepers on news. No, you're not. The internet beat you a long time ago. What you are good at, what you could be good at is being a curator.

Not to gatekeep knowledge, but to filter it. A newspaper should be certifying it, saying, hey, we validated this piece of information is real. A college should be saying we validate that the student can think and that the they can filter information, they can critically think, they can analyze. Right? That is that is the change that is happening in our world.

There is no shortage of information out there. A lot of it's wrong. But a company, an institution like higher education, could be that curator to say, hey, we're gonna teach people how to know what is true versus false. And that is an opportunity for you right now, in whatever industry or company you work in. Machine made, human-made, there's an ocean of potential content out there.

A lot of it's not great, right? What lens do you view it through? What's your point of view? How do you see it in unique and different ways? If there exist enough like-minded people who believe that your lens that you see things through is valuable, then you have economic opportunity to provide access to your curation, your filtration, your way of thinking about the information in your field.

And yes, there are software packages that do this. There's tons of them. They'll all do automated content curation and stuff, and they are imperfect at best. I should know. I wrote one of them.

It's in production, still in production for nine years, and it's okay. Right? There are still plenty of intangibles with software like that that require human supervision at the very least, even if the heavy lifting is done programmatically. Addition. Addition of new jobs, new services, new needs, is a much greater market opportunity when it comes to gendered AI than substitution.

And right now, the industry, your industry is wide open for someone to come and take the lead as the curator of the best of the best. This is not new. Think about Michelin, right? The Michelin starred chef. A Michelin starred chef receives a certification from the Michelin guide.

This is one of the best of the best in terms of chefs. That was made by a tire company. It's the same Michelin as it makes tires. They they made that content so that people will have a reason to go drive places and use their tires on their cars. That's an example of curation, right?

A company decided it was going to curate and turn it into something that is uniquely theirs, a point of view. There's a lot of restaurants and a lot of chefs, very few of them have Michelin stars. So that's today's episode. I hope to see what you curate and how your lens on the world provides value to people in an ever increasing sea of content. Thanks for tuning in.

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