The author non-ironically cites Klarna's year-old announcement around their pivot to letting AI do their customer support. Unmentioned is Klarna's announcement[1] from last month, after a full year the AI-first support, where they realize that people are the secret ingredient.<p>There's definitely some "there" there, but there is also a reason nobody is replacing their most expensive layer of staff (senior management) with much cheaper AIs.<p>1 - <a href="https://www.conversationalainews.com/klarnas-ceo-just-had-an-epiphany-about-ai-and-human-support/" rel="nofollow">https://www.conversationalainews.com/klarnas-ceo-just-had-an...</a>
"When I was a child, researching a new topic meant walking to the local library with a list of subjects, an effort that could consume half a day. Back then, knowledge wasn’t cheap or easily accessible."<p>It was literally a free library, open to every member of the public.
Someone recently tweeted that we use so much software because we’re now expected to do more work than is reasonably to be expected of humans and I’d have to agree.<p>There’s too much information to manage and too many tasks to juggle to keep up without good tools. AI just extends the range of what a person can take on.
The article assumes the future of work will remain digital, but AI won’t just change how we work, it will orchestrate everything transparently in the background, eliminating the need for digital workflows and automating knowledge work entirely. The real economic shift will be toward non-digital, real-world human experiences, things AI cannot replicate, like hands-on service, emotional connection, and physical interaction, making them the most valuable assets in the AI-driven era.
I read up till the "realisation moment" of something he could have easily found by using a notepad and some google searches. No, that wouldn't take weeks, it would likely take the same 2 to 3 hours that they felt "exhausted by" typing things into a textbox and reading.
Good stuff. No one asked farmers to do less work after tractors were invented. I agree with this author after my own experiments with AI tools over the last three years. They're here to help people execute more work, faster. The human work will become deciding and controlling what they do.
> One surprising feature about all this tech is that I crunch through more work, more quickly than before — with a startling and happy result that I spend less time in front of a screen than I have in years.<p>I sit back in my chair with my vending machine cocoa. The 100K word report is done. Five years ago it would have been a 20K report. But still my AI assistants helped me get this work done in half the time that the 20K report would have taken.<p>The research justifying the narrative that AI will free up time instead of causing more work to fill up the time (if it works; if not it doesn’t matter) is done. Meaning I can take the rest of the day off.<p>Tomorrow I have 2M words to research. Five years ago that would have been 300K. But my AI assistants will summarize it for me. Meaning it still only will take half the time.
Azeem Azhar never has to worry about employment in an AI-obsessed world -- no executive worth his salt will ever be satisfied with an AI-based lickspittle. You need the genuine human article for that.
I'm of two minds about all this. As someone who has become obsessed with seeing what these models are capable of, I can confirm that they can be used to achieve unprecedented things. But you get out what you put in. The most interesting results of these models are human-AI collaborations. If the "knowledge economy" just becomes bots passing generated outputs back and forth between each other, I think we're in for a rude awakening.<p>I can think of many AI generated outputs, perhaps with many quality suggestions, that I skimmed over or didn't fully appreciate. Did the sum of knowledge increase in the world? No, because knowledge has to be received by a mind. It's only the ones that I engaged with, influenced and ultimately made my own, that left an impression and added to the sum of knowledge in the world, often though a kind of alchemy of me and the model interacted in a "mind-meld" greater than the sum of its parts.<p>Human minds-minds in general, which these models don't have-stand for something. They're the glue that stitches things together, that makes important decisions and judgement calls, that forms the integration point where everything comes together. We can't remove that from the equation without losing something in return.
I've also caught myself making embarrassingly lazy queries for coding problems that would have taken me 10 minutes to fix, but I prompt for them anyways because I've already been through that song and dance and want those 10 minutes back. If I kept doing that, if that was all I ever did, my brain would wither to the size of a walnut. I genuinely worry how LLMs are going to deprive an entire generation of youths of the use of their minds.
The author basically tries to argue that not only corporate talent with low pay (e.g. customer service), but high impact talent pools will go from being scarce to being replaced by AI agents (e.g. PhD level researchers discovering new pharmaceuticals).<p>I don't think this has played out thus far. It still takes a qualified individual to ask the right questions of an LLM or Agent and then refine the results.<p>What I do agree with is that it's made talented individuals more productive, but that's less eye catching than claiming that it will cause companies to entirely restructure because educated labor will be replaced by LLMs.
AI is a big change, which will permeate life. This kind of change can be scary. Stories trying to predict how things will change is both meaningless and also thought provoking.<p>History is full of big changes. We've all grown up with grandma's stories of indoor plumbing or electricity coming, or TV or whatever. Many of us now would sound insane describing a rotary dial phone to our grandkids.<p>So yeah, change is coming, but to be fair it's always been here. And the effects of the change can be surprising or predictable. But we'll figure it out as we go.<p>When I went to school there were no mobile phones. Computers at home were very niche. There was no internet. No email. Crumbs, when away from home we'd write, you know, letters! Being a typist was a job. Secretaries took dictation and wrote in shorthand. If we wanted a meeting we got together in the same room.<p>Will AI change things? Surely it will. Welcome to my world.
For most of history, hiring a dozen PhDs meant a massive budget and months of lead time. Today, a few keystrokes in a chatbot summon that brainpower in seconds.<p>Lol. Poor Azeem Azhar who is a Freelance Contributor.