It’s not like we haven’t seen this before. I am old enough to remember having seen people whose jobs it was to draw economic charts using letraset and putting it on slides/in papers. Now excel and PowerPoint have replaced that. Remember typing pools? Etc. of course there is an adjustment frictional period when people whose skills don’t match new requirements lose out, but technology makes the space for new skills to be learnt.
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In high school I had a job as a typesetter and copy editor. I was a whiz at setting book type on our very fancy and exciting Compugraphic machine, and pasting up its output onto boards (the type came out of the machine on a scroll of photo paper, then we would manually decide where the page breaks would be, slice the scroll into pages with an xacto knife, then stick the pieces to boards with wax). 
I think the one we used was the original EditWriter, since it didn’t have the option to use files from a word processor (you had to enter everything directly on the machine) 1977 | The history of prepress & publishing
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While that is true, if the time and cost of education for the new skills is greater than for the old skills, that can limit access to the jobs using the new skills.
Additionally, if the time and cost is high but the economy changes quickly, it may be risky to invest the time and money learning skills for a job that may be obsolete by the time you are ready for it.
Interestingly, apparently Ezra Klein had a recent podcast episode where he talks about skills (I read this as “partner with machines” language below) and the need for a more liberal arts education. Not that this gets to the issue of what job will this student actually get, but that at the very least, the student should focus more on developing intellectual skills versus what appear to be more practical ones. The below text is from an email my D26 and I received from St. John’s College touting this.
Here is what Ezra Klein had to say in his interview with Rebecca Winthrop, director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, and Jenny Anderson, co-author of The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better:
“…in a world where we have AI, the most important thing for human beings to be is as human as possible – and that what we need to do is return to more classical education; that what we need to do is be reading the great books and developing the attentional faculties that a lot of data and anecdata suggest that even very elite students are losing: to read a long book and think about it, to write a long essay, to be educated in the way that was considered high-civilization 70 years ago, and that you might get at a St. John’s or a University of Chicago or certain private schools today; that, actually, what we should do is retreat somewhat: school should be a place not where we learn how to partner with machines because the rest of society is going to tell you how to do that; school should be a place where we develop specifically human faculties such that we are capable and flexible and attentive in moving through a world that we just cannot predict.”
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Absolutely. Degrees should teach you how to think and problem solve, not just to do certain tasks.
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I should also add that I’m not that convinced on AI’s ability to replace entire teams. Having spent the last 2-3 years incorporating AI into the software product we make at work and then implementing that software at customer orgs, it’s pretty clear that while AI delivers productivity gains the 0 —> 1 cost and complexity is way too high. And results don’t always scale well requiring a lot more add on investments in observability and security.
For our own code gen, it’s sucks at handling the complexity of our code base but is great at auto completing SQL and Python for discrete use cases unconnected from our main codebase. The data analysts on my team now do way more work much more quickly because SQL they quality is pretty solid.
IMO, AI is a massive market inside an even more massive bubble. The bubble to market ratio is too high as of today. It’s TBD what happens 10 years from now.
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Right. That’s the difference between getting a CS degree and learning programming through an online coding class or boot camp. Many don’t know the difference and think it’s all the same — but it’s not.
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100%. Country I came from had universities and what I guess were the equivalent of the old polytechnics in the UK. Guy I knew ran recruiting for a large manufacturing company. He said the guys they recruited from the polys usually hit the ground faster because they’d been trained in specific areas, whereas the university graduates had to be taught specific skills but the latter usually went further in their careers because they tended to adapt to changes better.
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The problem is that the education that St. John’s College graduates get is not valued by employers at the hiring stage. This means that the graduates (a) have difficulty finding jobs at graduation, and (b) may not get jobs where they can demonstrate their longer term value. The College Scorecard results for the Annapolis and Santa Fe campuses are not encouraging.
Realistically, a new entrant into the workforce needs both the specific skills to get hired in the first place, and the adaptability to demonstrate continued value to the employer and grow into other roles beyond the entry level. Going straight into the unemployment statistics means not being able to demonstrate any value to any employer or make any progress in any career, while not being adaptable makes one vulnerable to job obsolescence.
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Gift article.
Yikes.
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Very interesting - thanks for sharing!
It makes me wonder if capital that could be deployed for a student’s education might be better served as capital for that young person to start a business. Maybe we all evolve to become a world of shopkeepers that invent new things to sell, but the “hard work” of building is done by AI. Just musing…
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Considering how many students who come to CC wanting to major in finance or CS, I feel as though this needs to get greater attention:
Oxford Economics, a research firm that studies labor markets, found that unemployment for recent graduates was heavily concentrated in technical fields like finance and computer science, where A.I. has made faster gains.
And another source of warning bells:
A.I. companies are starting with software engineering and other technical fields because that’s where the low-hanging fruit is. (And, perhaps, because that’s where their own labor costs are highest.) But these companies believe the same techniques will soon be used to automate work in dozens of occupations, ranging from consulting to finance to marketing.
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I was in NYC last weekend and spoke with a cousin who works in advertising sales for a large technology company. About four hundred people report to her. I asked her how AI was affecting her group. One example that she gave was that new hire onboarding staff in HR were being replaced with AI. Management had determined that the typical HR employee who walks new hires through salary, benefits, etc. was superfluous. She said she expects many more cuts and less hiring.
I also passed a billboard with the catchy title “#PLS FIX: AI for IB” advertising a company providing AI services for the investment banking community. I can see a lot of room for AI to shave head counts in that space.
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My husband used to mentor small businesses. There are a lot of people out there who know their “thing” really well, but don’t have a clue about how to actually run a business successfully. You need a lot more than a good idea or new invention…
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But that’s what the AI is supposed to tell us to how to do! 
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Sure, maybe one day it’ll be trustworthy enough for that. If you’re happy to sink your capital into a venture with Ai to run the business side, great. Me, not so much right now.
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A lot of public posturing by executives is just that.
The text based LLM models are great at producing and summarizing content where the room of creativity/error is high and the degree of difficulty is not too much (like summarizing long text into shorter summaries). As a result, the most adopted use cases tend to be around things like copywriting (email generation), information sharing (the HR example above), conversational bots trained on prior transcripts (customer service, call centers etc.)
We’ve tried to use image generation for our marketing copy and for something as simple as making website updates. The results have been mostly meh and its been much more straight forward to just let our design team use these tools when and where they want to rather than trying to automate their jobs.
Generally, I get very skeptical when CEOs with something to sell start shilling AI for all kids of crazy stuff. Anthropic of course is selling multi-million dollar deals to enterprise so of course the CEO is saying AI will automate everything. Microsoft wants everyone to use co-pilot so of course they are forcing their teams to eat their own ■■■■■■■. And Jensen needs the narrative out there to pump up GPU sales. If they don’t do this publicly, then they won’t be able to sell with credibility to their customers.
I had a good laugh to read that Marc Andreesen had claimed that VC is the only industry that is apparently irreplaceable with AI since its more art than science and requires judgment. Has he met corporate America yet?
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Unfortunately, this doesn’t surprise me. Anecdotally, I’ve heard from some friends that their recent CS grads have had little success in the job market. When I think of all the prospective “quants” hoping for lucrative finance gigs, I can’t imagine that AI won’t soon do the math, and associated analysis, faster and much cheaper. No easy answers here and unless you work directly with your hands, I don’t think any career is really AI proof.
Anyone who thinks VC, or any other industry that employs financial modeling and research, is immune to AI related job losses isn’t nearly as smart as they think they are.
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I find the traditional definition of a liberal arts education that is centered primarily on “the great books” increasingly inadequate for our modern world. While it’s essential for students to read, interpret, and debate challenging texts, relying solely on the canon of Western thought is too narrow a path to meet that goal.
There are many ways to cultivate a well-developed mind: interdisciplinary studies, project-based learning, ethics classes with debate, global studies, and the scientific method all foster critical and creative thinking that future job seekers need.
The liberal arts shouldn’t just be about preserving the past, but about practicing habits of intellect. The great books can offer one valuable entry point, but they should not become a gatekeeper. Not all students, especially those with more STEM-oriented inclinations, will connect with that approach. That doesn’t mean they can’t acquire the same intellectual skills through other means.
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