Journalist Ira Glasswho hosts the NPR show “This American Life”, he is not a computer scientist. He doesn’t work for Google, Apple or Nvidia. But he has a good ear for useful phrases and in 2024 he organized an entire episode around one that might resonate with anyone who feels blindsided by the pace of AI development: “Unprepared for what’s already happened.”
Coined by science journalist Alex Steffenthe phrase captures the unsettling sense that “the experience and expertise you have acquired” may now be obsolete – or, at the very least, far less valuable than it once was.
Whenever I lead workshops at law firms, government agencies, or nonprofits, I hear the same concern. Highly educated, successful professionals worry whether there will be a place for them in an economy where genetic artificial intelligence can quickly — and cheaply — complete a growing list of tasks for which vast numbers of people are currently paid.
Seeing a future that doesn’t include you
In tech reporter Cade Metz’s 2022 book, “Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook and the World,” describes the panic that gripped a veteran Microsoft researcher named Chris Brockett when Brockett first encountered an artificial intelligence program that could essentially perform everything he had spent decades learning how to master.
Overwhelmed by the thought that a piece of software had now rendered his entire skill set and knowledge base irrelevant, Brockett was rushed to the hospital for what he thought was a heart attack.
“My 52-year-old body had one of those moments where I saw a future I wasn’t part of,” he later told Metz.
In his 2018 book, “Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial IntelligenceMIT physicist Max Tegmark expresses similar anxiety.
“As technology continues to improve, will the rise of artificial intelligence eventually eclipse those abilities that provide my current sense of self-worth and value in the job market?”
The answer to this question, worryingly, can often seem beyond our individual control.
“We’re seeing more AI-related products and advancements in a day than we saw in a year a decade ago,” a Silicon Valley product manager he told a Vanity Fair reporter in 2023. Things have accelerated since then.
Even Dario Amodei – the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, the company that created the popular chatbot Claude – has been shaken by the growing power of AI tools. “I think of all the times I’ve written code,” he said in an interview on the “Hard Fork” tech podcast. “It’s like a part of my identity that I’m good at it. And then, oh my gosh, there will be these (AI) systems that [can perform a lot better than I can].”
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The irony that these fears live inside the brain of someone who leads one of the world’s most important artificial intelligence companies is not lost on Amodei.
“Even as the one building these systems,” he added, “even as one of those who benefit the most from (them), there’s still something a little threatening about (them).
Author and agency
However, as a labor economist David Autor has argued, we all have more action on the future than we think.
In 2024, Autor interviewed him Bloomberg News immediately after publishing a research paper titled Applying artificial intelligence to rebuild middle-class jobs. The paper explores the idea that artificial intelligence, if managed properly, could help a larger pool of people perform the kind of higher-value — and higher-paying — “decision-making tasks currently assigned to elite specialists like doctors, lawyers, coders and educators.”
This change, Autor suggests, “would improve the quality of jobs for workers without college degrees, reduce income inequality, and—as the Industrial Revolution did for consumer goods—reduce the cost of basic services like health care, education, and legal expertise.”
It’s an interesting, hopeful argument, and Autor, who has spent decades studying the effects of automation and computerization on the workforce, has the intellectual weight to explain it without coming across as Pollyannish.
But what I found most encouraging in the interview was Autor’s response to a question about a type of “destructive AI” that believes widespread economic displacement is inevitable and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.
“The future should not be seen as an exercise in forecasting or forecasting,” he said. “It should be treated as a planning problem – because the future is not (something) where we just wait and see what happens. … We have enormous control over the future we live in, and [the quality of that future] it depends on the investments and structures we create today.”
On the starting line
I try to emphasize Autor’s point that the future is more of a “planning problem” than a “forecasting exercise” in all the AI courses and workshops I teach to law students and lawyers, many of whom are worried about their own job prospects.
The nice thing about the current AI moment, I tell them, is that there’s still time for purposeful action. Although the first scientific paper on neural networks was published in 1943, we are still very much in the early stages of so-called “genital artificial intelligence”.
No student or worker is hopelessly behind. Nor is anyone imposingly ahead.
Instead, each of us is in an enviable spot: right at the starting line.
