At last year’s World Economic Forum Growth Summit, Professor Richard Baldwin dropped a zinger :
"AI won't take your job, it's somebody using AI that will take your job."
The quote spread like wildfire, and pretty soon every self-proclaimed AI subject matter expert on Twitter/X and LinkedIn was borrowing the quote to feign insight into the new paradigm of generative AI.
But even the grammar of this statement is not quite right. Imagine if someone stood up back in 1995 and said “The internet won’t take your job. Someone using the internet will.” It may have sounded reasonably alarming at the time — but today that statement sounds absurd because we know just how ubiquitous the internet quickly became.
We can view AI much in the same way. AI is being propagated to virtually every part of our daily lives at a pace that would make even Kurzweil’s adoption graphs blush. I just saw an ad for AI-enabled motorized roller skates!
When you extrapolate out — it becomes very hard to imagine a circumstance where one person has access to some form of AI that up-levels them far beyond what the next person might have such that their employment would be at risk. That’s not to say GPT does not offer advantages to those who spruce up their resumes or practice interview Q&As with Claude or ChatGPT.
But alas, no one is going to lose their job in 2024 because they aren’t leveraging ChatGPT to write their e-mails, and in 2025 every user of Microsoft Outlook will intrinsically have grammatical superpowers thanks to Microsoft’s Co-Pilot products.
And it is no surprise that Professor Baldwin agrees. In a prior part of the conversation where his now-famous quote was uttered, he is specifically talking about how AI will quickly up-level those of us with lower levels of skill or experience.
That’s not to say AI will not continue to be a competitive advantage, especially in the near term. Currently in early 2024, there are many generative AI models available in both closed and open source. Having deep understanding of the technologies and the ability to fine-tune and leverage them are absolutely endowing a select few with superhuman advantage.
But this too is a transient phase for most. As AI becomes fully democratized, it won’t be a matter of an AI-Assisted Plumber taking a Non-AI Assisted Plumber’s job. It’s about elevating everyone’s game. Imagine a future where every journeyman plumber is operating with the proficiency of a master plumber. Part of their toolkit will be an augmented reality headset running a multi-modal “PlumberGPT” that is watching everything they do ensuring the next step taken is the perfect one.
Even more exciting is to imagine what a Master Plumber can do having constant, collaborative access to their AI partner.
Every human Mario will have their AI Luigi.
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