“So, you work at a job that essentially takes away your own job?”, said the son.This is the kind of meta stuff that he finds exciting.
The Thanksgiving week-end was rife with conversations about the corporate drama that in yester years could be equated to the coups of thrones. Would the CEO go? Would the Board of Governors go? Would they both go? Who would be their replacement?
Last year the world popped their popcorns and watched the unfolding drama of an unraveling Twitter with Elon Musk and his hostile takeover of the company, now rechristened X, though the URL still points to twitter.com because the TFE team was probably let go.
This year, it seems much of the dramatic action came from OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman. In modern day Wall Street wars, CEOs, (or C-Staff) and the Boards of companies provide for much of the action. Will the market hold? Will the Sensex drop?
What happens to the interest rates?
One of our friends was explaining to the children about their own roles – technical roles in which they enable AI to be utilized intelligently. One was working on images, another on code frameworks itself. A niece who was majoring in biology told me how they were already being encouraged to use ChatGPT to generate code for them. They only needed to see the results of the datasets fed into the model.
Fascinating as it all was, I was left musing on the future of work. It seems a rather recurring theme of late. There are image generators to replace artists, code generators for software engineers, of course plenty of writing that can be replaced with intelligent prompting. So, why not the design and maintenance of these systems too?
I picked up the book from my recent library pile:
The Worst Children’s Job in History – Sir Tony Robinson
The book was truly horrific and true. If anyone was wondering about the future of jobs and feeling glum, they could actually be grateful that the past nature of our jobs are well behind us.
Every job not only held misery, but a generous helping of walloping, not enough food, abysmal conditions, no thought for safety etc. Compared to those jobs, the present day conditions of occupying ourselves and our children seems fantastic. I only hope this trend continues for, our current nature of jobs is about to upended again.
It seems with the speed of technological challenges, the cycles with which our jobs are upended seems to be quicker and quicker.
A couple of generations ago, seamstresses, tailors, knitters, bat makers, ball makers, farmers, equipment handlers all saw their jobs upended by mechanization.
Then the next generation saw people’s fortunes needing more specialized skillsets such as coding, scientific knowledge etc.
Recently, call center jobs, desk phones, phones that were in the family room all went away, to be replaced by cell phones. Those of us who remember having to take a friend’s call in the living room with three uncles, five aunts, three cousins of varying age and maturity levels, two grandparents and a maid, will forever envy the children of today who quietly buzz out of vicinity taking their phone calls mysteriously with them.
The next wave of AI seems to be disrupting industries that I’d hoped would not be. Creative industries that are already hard to make a living in: storytelling, image generation, writing, etc
Will our grandchildren read books about us in this era and feel sorry for us that we had to slave in front of our computers all day long to accomplish certain things, spend days getting tests done in medical labs to determine what was the matter with us?
What would the future of our jobs look like?
More importantly, in this quest for bettering the use of our time, do we hope to become at peace with who we are without being defined by what occupies our time? If so, maybe we should start equipping ourselves towards that, shouldn’t we?
Let me know your thoughts.
Books:
- The Worst Children’s Jobs in History – Sir Tony Robinson
- The Age of AI – Henry Kissinger
Nourish-n-Cherish 