Work. 16 notes.

I can’t imagine what it is to be a young graduate looking for a job in this horrible job market when the uncertainty is so palpable: For many at the start of their careers, things are just as bad. Government analysis last month insisted that entry-level positions were declining in line with the rest of the job market…

Post type: Stream of consciousness. How sure am I? Reasonably sure, until the next model upgrade. Note: I dumped these as voice notes into Claude and had it clean them up. I wouldn’t want to be a young graduate or postgraduate looking for a job right now. If my LinkedIn inbox is any indication of the state of India’s…

File under AI as normal technology:

History shows that the process almost always takes longer than the inventors expect. Legal and regulatory hurdles slow things down. Companies have to retrain workers or hire new ones. Corporate leaders have to develop new processes and overcome resistance from reluctant managers and cautious information technology departments.

“These conversations have been, in my opinion, overly focused on what the technology can do,” said Martha Gimbel, the executive director of the Budget Lab at Yale University. “There’s plenty of technology that could have changed things and didn’t.”

Many hospitals kept patients’ health records on paper for decades after the technology existed to digitize them, Ms. Gimbel noted. Videoconferencing tools have existed for years, but it took a pandemic to force companies to embrace them.

Nick Maggiulli writes that AI disruption will be the same as previous technological shifts:

Some will argue that “this time is different” because AI is replacing knowledge work, not just physical work. And, if this comes to pass, what will there be left for people to do?

It’s a compelling argument, but people made similar arguments about the automation of physical work. There was literally a group of people in England in the early 1800s called the Luddites who destroyed weaving machines due to their adverse impact on textile workers.

The Luddites couldn’t imagine what would replace their livelihoods and the same is true for us now. There will be future roles that require a different set of human skills that we can’t even imagine today. These skills won’t directly compete with LLMs, but will enhance them.

Good advice from Tyler Cowen:

If strong AI will lower the value of your human capital, your current wage is relatively high compared to your future wage. That is an argument for working harder now, at least if your current and pending pay can rise with greater effort (not true for all jobs).

Jeremy Siegel says there will be no AI apocalypse.

I hate to agree with Altman but I think he’s right:

“I don’t know what the exact percentage is, but there’s some AI washing where people are blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do, and then there’s some real displacement by AI of different kinds of jobs,” Altman said

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) for normal people is here.

💯 We are headed for an age of anxiety, grievances, and disillusionment, and I don’t think our systems, as they are designed, are equipped to handle the tsunami of angst:

THERE is still time for the cheerful and the gloomy to disagree, sincerely, about the net impact on employment from automation and artificial intelligence. Perhaps AI will unleash a job-creating economic boom for the ages, as boosters maintain. Maybe on balance the doom-mongers are right, and grim legions of algorithm-guided bots and robots will conquer one industry (and profession) after another.

One outcome is not up for debate. Across the industrialised world, wise politicians are braced for soaring public anxiety about change. Whether AI’s long-run effects are benign or cruel, many citizens are about to find once-valued skills and credentials surplus to the requirements of the economy. Even as new jobs are created, some flesh-and-blood workers may lack autonomy, or indeed dignity, if they feel they are serving AI masters.

Good perspective on how AI is changing the nature of work on different types of organizations.

What fills the work shaped hole in us in a post-work world?

Nathan Lambert on how we need to change the way we work in the age of AI agents:

Every engineer needs to learn how to design systems. Every researcher needs to learn how to run a lab. Agents push the humans up the org chart.

I feel like I have an advantage by being early to this wave, but no longer feel like just working hard will be an lasting edge. When I can have multiple agents working productively in parallel on my projects, my role is shifting more to pointing the army rather than using the power-tool. Pointing the agents more effectively is far more useful than me spending a few more hours grinding on a problem.

In his book Bullshit Jobs, the late, great David Graeber defined bullshit jobs as paid employment so completely pointless and unnecessary that even the employees cannot justify their existence. He identified five types: Flunkies exist to make somebody else feel important. Think doormen at buildings that don’t need…

Dean Ball thinks we’ll soon have virtual co-workers. I kinda agree: My guess: the virtual coworker coming next year is going to be something like a nice UI sitting on top of an agent operating your computer using mostly a command line, occasionally GUI use, with obscure bash commands translated to natural language by a…

Nabeel Qureshi on automation: Anything that can be automated should be. There’s no good reason humans should be making excel models or powerpoints in 10 years, any more than they should be hand-washing clothes. It’s toil and drudgery. What will remain? Anything we want to do because it’s fun or interesting. May be…

VCs say the damnedest things, and I hate to be the guy who agrees with a VC. But sometimes—not often, but sometimes—they say something useful. Today I came across this tweet by Anish Acharya of a16z: the timeline is full of people using Claude Code to generate ads, recover corrupted video, make landing pages, manage…