Anthropic says something:
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Wow, what an interesting chart. Interesting that architecture and engineering hasn’t taken more advantage of AI yet. I guess it’s just a matter of time.
Was just discussing that with DH. I think it varies by engineering discipline. As a civil engineer in land development - very traditional civil - I find civil engineers to be slower to adopt technology than some other engineers. I still figure out some things on paper first as I find it easier than doing that on a screen. However, I also believe that a lot of the design could be done with AI now or in the very near future.
Won’t impact my career that much at this point. If it means I retire a few years before expected, so be it. If I was younger, I would be on the front end of figuring out AI in my field.
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This made me laugh. I do wonder how much is just our “age.” My younger coworker does everything in models. Always looks at models rotating them this way and that. I’m like noooooo! Create contours!!! I can only visualize in contours! It shows me exactly what I want to know. Models look like blobs to me. And I most definitely use paper and pencil for lots of stuff.
Edit - I use AI to polish up my professional emails
Yes, I’m kind of sad I’m too old to use AI much. I learned CAD when it was brand new.
But when I started, nobody even had a computer on their desks. I am envious of young engineers, who can look online when they get a tough assignment. We didn’t have any resources at all, except books and the older engineers who were busy.
The previously linked chart is referencing the database at https://www.anthropic.com/economic-index#job-explorer . You can search by specific job titles. For civil engineers, it lists 0.01% Claude usage. Among all job titles with “engineer” in the name, median was 0.02% Claude usage.
Engineers really like using their own brains to solve problems.
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We (at least older engineers) also don’t trust programs or AI unless we can verify their reliability with some hand calcs. We would own the liability if the results were incorrect.
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I think this is an astute observation.
Engineers LOVED excel when it was first introduced. It didn’t solve problems but it made organizing the data that was then used to solve the problem very, very efficient (a tidy engineering solution!) Nobody claimed that excel gave you the answer– just that you’d figure out an answer, store the algorithm you’d created for next time, so that you weren’t constantly re-inventing the wheel.
I think AI is still in its “we can do everything” mode when it’s clear that it can’t (yet).
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Interesting article today in the Harvard Gazette: Can ChatGPT Plan Your Retirement? (how AI and large language models are revolutionizing financial advice). The article is in line with the chart posted above indicating that finance is one of those areas with high theoretical AI capability. The academic interviewed discusses how he sees the role of AI evolving in performing financial tasks and providing financial advice.
The Black Swan guy would warn against this, I imagine.
My impression is that most financial planners are like most surgeons. They are competent technicians who execute the prescribed process well but don’t focus as much on the outcome as on the process. I wonder if AI can replace the people who tend to follow the standard process rules/assumptions.
Here’s an interesting article about disguised layoffs resulting from AI – companies who wanted to lay off works because of AI but did not want to appear heartless can now use economic uncertainty to justify AI-related layoffs: Worries persists in energy markets despite an oil price retreat | Semafor
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I can’t get past the paywall, but this seems to be on topic. Maybe someone else can:
Here a couple of other takes on what will happen to employment as a result of AI:
The Billionaire OpenAI investor article was locked for me, but I was able to read the one about Sam Altman admitting AI is killing the labor-capital balance.
These were some of the passages from the article that struck me the most:
for centuries, maybe millennia, humans have learned how to structure society to manage scarcity, and now we have to quickly learn the opposite, managing “abundance.” “So that’s, like, a real change to how capitalism has worked,” he said, noting that capitalism has also depended on at least something of a power balance between labor and capital. “But if it’s hard in many of our current jobs to outwork a GPU, then that changes.” He said it, frankly, stumps him. “If there was an easy consensus answer, we’d have done it by now, so I don’t think anyone knows what to do.”
Of course, Pandora’s Box has already been opened, but it saddens me how little thought has been put into ethics at the front end of the process. Whether that’s in the business world or science world, it seems that too often companies skip the step of wondering if something should happen/exist rather than trying to figure out how to make it happen. And now, this system has been unleashed and even its creators don’t know how it should be managed.
achieving this era of abundance will not be easy. Altman predicted that traditional economic metrics like GDP might plummet in a “forever deflationary world,” forcing society to rethink how it measures quality of life. Spookily, Altman was echoing the viral doomsday AI essay from Citrini Research that warned of spiralling deflation and “ghost GDP,” leading to economic chaos within 18 months.
A forever deflationary world with economic chaos combined with the geopolitical situations around the world definitely feels like a hopeless situation. It’s one thing for people who are established and nearing the end of their careers or already retired, but it’s another thing entirely for the generation that is just trying to launch or that has yet to reach adulthood and will be trying to navigate this future.
While Altman insisted, back in December, he is “not a long-term jobs doomer” and believes humanity will eventually invent new roles, he did not sugarcoat the immediate future. He warned that “the next few years are going to be a painful adjustment,” heavily marked by “very intense and uncomfortable debates” over how to reshape society. Several weeks ago, one of Altman’s AI counterparts, Sir Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, a Nobel prize winner himself, told Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell that AI abundance will lead to a “kind of new renaissance,” but there will be a shakeout over the next 10 years en route to it.
If a reshaping of society will be taking place, I would love to have leaders (political, economic, scientific, etc.) who are extremely thoughtful and reflective about how that should be taking place. Based on how we’ve reached the current moment, though, I can’t say I’m optimistic about it happening.
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Leave it to a billionaire to talk about how people will be able to pursue their passions (a laudable idea) without fully explaining how people are going to support themselves (even if AI drives down the cost of things).
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It leaves me sad for my kids. My eldest is on hiatus from college (one year left) because he doesn’t see a path for himself. He is cynical about the state of the world and the future job market (and who can blame him). Meanwhile my younger son is struggling to find an internship this summer (will graduate next May - a year early) despite a solid resume, strong gpa, practical major (Econ), attending a “name” school and getting started early. And he hasn’t applied to any ultra-competitive internships (ie. Goldman). Of course, in the scheme of things my kids are very fortunate - no loans, school paid for, will eventually inherit some $$ - but they want purpose and direction in their lives and are struggling to find that.
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Yes, if AI makes everything much less expensive, it will take much less income to support oneself… But the unstated problem is that if AI reduces many people’s income to zero or otherwise below what the AI-lowered level is to maintain a reasonable life, that is not a formula for a pleasant society going forward.
Khosla did say more about the task that the political economy must take up to organize itself to share the AI generated abundance widely. Recognizing the issue, he says, “Incentives is what capitalism is about. By the way, capitalism is by permission of democracy, you can’t leave 80% of the population behind. They will revoke capitalism if that happens.”. He does advocate elimination of the special lower capital gain tax rates and elimination of income taxes below $100k income, making income taxes more progressive, but he is probably among a small minority of the moneyed class that has disproportionate political lobbying influence.
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As ShawSon said a decade ago, to the (very large) extent that the gains from AI redound to the creators of productivity-enhancing applications, the folks who transfer money to these creators (the professional investor class like VCs and PE folks), and the owners of capital (the already wealthy), any sane polity would redistribute the gains before and not after it leads to great popular discontent.
This would involve some kind of Universal Basic Income and also creating a shift in the ways that we define ourselves. Many in the US get a sense of identity, meaning and belonging from work. If work is going to go away, how do folks get the sense of identity, meaning and belonging.
But, post-Citizens United and Snyder v. United States (which distinguished between bribes (pre-arranged payments to influence an act) and gratuities (rewards for past acts) and found that a generous gift to a government official for a past act is not bribery), it is hard to see how our polity can move in advance of the problem.
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Sadly, you are right. I’ve been worried about the growing gulf between the haves and have nots for a while now - not because I’m a “socialist” (whatever that means) but because I can’t imagine a stable society where most of the benefits accrue to a tiny portion of people at the top. It just doesn’t seem sustainable.
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