Don’t bet against human potential
When people have purpose - get out of their way.
News flash! There will be no more white collar jobs in 2030! Go find a new trade!
This week you may see a lot of the LinkedIn folk, VCs, and other tech folk alike with posts that say some ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini generated variation of that statement after (not) reading this https://www.anthropic.com/research/labor-market-impacts from Anthropic.
It’s quite an alarming conclusion to make and quite a premature conclusion to make. The essay from Anthropic is not quite as conclusive or fantastical on that dimension and took what I felt was a relatively dry and academic (read: safe) approach to the topic, I suppose they don’t want to alarm anyone (it can’t be helped I suppose).
Few observations I have:
Over the last 25 years, predictions about the future at best were vague, broad, and captured trends, at best. At worst, their accuracy couldn’t have been more off when there were predictions that automation would lead to a leisure society. Pew Research Center study on how we work way more than ever
Task expansion over the last 25 years has not been shrinking, it’s been growing, given this, a snapshot in time of what the most common tasks are for any given occupation is extremely limited in its ability to be a predictive tool for a future that also accounts for the developments and changes in work between now and that future. See HBR Article “AI Doesn’t Reduce Work-It Intensifies It”
Two words: Work Intensification - work overload, work hours, time pressures - everyone wants MORE, everyone wants it NOW. Meta analysis of studies from 1989 to 2022
For my own experience, I can assure you with the advancement of technology, I do not have any less work, if anything, I’ve never had more work, but the demands of work are always for more productivity. Tasks in your profession are like roads, when you automate some, you get new ones, an endless cycle to fill that void with productivity.
What I find is that it is hilarious and absurd that people would spend so much of their time talking about something that has yet to be set in stone in the future that they absolutely are not in an authoritative place to be pontificating about what it will or will not look like.
Do you remember that person at work, pick any one of your jobs, who would complain and complain and complain about a problem, but miraculously never offered any contribution towards solving this problem, never took any initiative. Yelling about this and offering nothing useful merely serves to discourage the people around you from focusing on what they and the people around them can do today to build a better future really is a disservice. Would you say that person is a role model for your company’s employees, for yourself, that this is who we want to lead? Definitely not. That person can please stop/go away/fall in a ditch. Go build something, maybe?
People in the past are horrifically bad at understanding at a granular level in a precise way how we will work and what we will work on. No different than my high school or college counselors not being able to tell me decades ago what I’d be doing today. HOW THE HECK WOULD THEY KNOW. The way things evolve depend on an endless set of factors that have yet to be determined in addition to existing ones that persist. Anyways - don’t waste too much time on those people and their predictions. Those predictions are about as good as me predicting the lottery numbers tomorrow.
Will the continued development and improvements of LLMs and other models change work? Yes. Will some tasks that we do today stop being done by us and begin to be automated partially or entirely? Yes. Has work changed ever in the past and will it change in the future? Yes. Do we have to change how we prepare ourselves and those around us for a world that is changing? Yes. Did we have to do that before LLMs? Yes. Are we supremely awful at it in general and like to put people into rigid roles, job structures, and weird job architectures that take longer to agree on than it takes to improve GPT or Opus? Yes.
Turns out when we build, we expand our thinking, when we expand our thinking, we grow. Humans seemingly have an endless ability to pursue something, I tend to think that “something” is a proxy for purpose, and ideally purpose itself. When we get good at something, we find 5 more things, when we master our current role, we get restless and bored. The job market definitely has evolved in a way that doesn’t seem to let us rest, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ but who am I to judge. When we pursue purpose though, we continue to push our potential.
We solve problems, we find new ones, we build things, some things last longer, some things don’t, some things were useful, some things weren’t that useful. With each iteration we learn more and more. We fundamentally change and reimagine intentionally or unintentionally everyday we work towards something.
Do I think as a society we’re good at giving people opportunity, not particularly. Do I think we’re good at teaching how to learn instead of teaching a bunch of arbitrarily defined “playbooks” for how to “succeed at life”? No. So there’s a lot of work to do, definitely.
The wisdom people can share are their personal experiences, feelings, and perspective on the human condition. That helps us relate and understand in a way that transcends the superficial differences of our respective eras. I know your high school counselor didn’t look at you and say, “You are going to be a product manager at a B2B SaaS company!”.
There are people all around the world, everyday of our lives, who get no attention, no limelight, no featured guest call on a widely listened to podcast who do incredible things in spite of the limited imaginations of others. Because those with limited imaginations don’t understand how much potential humans have.
Don’t stop imagining.
Don’t stop seeking purpose.
Don’t bet against how much potential humans have.
I love seeing what people are building, I love seeing the imaginations of those out there trying to solve problems, there’s so much energy in it!
Everyone else, you tire me with your pointless points.
Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.