🌊 The Truth About Zohran Mamdani

short answer: AI will do both - it will create new jobs (i.e. AI-first roles, enough manufacturing roles to garner political favor and virtue signal) but the amount of 'traditional' work that will become automated or obsolete will far out number any new gains.

Digging deeper - think about who's investing in the technologies, who's driving the adoption - it's tech or tech-enabled organizations that are relentlessly pursuing growth and shareholder value above all else. If you are the executive team, or board, of any company you know that labor is your largest expense on the balance sheet. So if AI, or automation, can give you the same (or higher) output/top line growth, while minimizing labor costs, of course they're going to do it.

Workers need to evolve to meet the demand. We can't wait around for the noble ideas of UBI or robot taxes to offset our losses. In America, unfortunately, they will never happen.

thanks for being awesome!

Another great, in-depth, balanced article.  As the former head of Global Industry AI for my firm (retired last year), I was really impressed by your collective grasp of the issues, lack of sensationalism, and balance in the POVs you provide.

Three reactions to the AI article, based on my direct experience in the field:

1) Whether it's Altman, Musk, Ng, Schmidt, Huang, or any others in the industry, they are all just guessing on outcomes, no matter how informed and certain they may seem.  In some ways, they can be too close to their own tech to be objective about the real world outcomes of its application. As an example, just a few years ago, Zuckerberg placed a huge bet on the metaverse... that clearly was overoptimistic then and may continue to be for a long time.

2) While the examples of what's happening to new college grad employment are clearly real, the causality is highly debatable.  There is no question about the impact on hardcore coders... this is going to accelerate, as it's a highly repeatable/rote task when you get down to it.  The rest?  Much more likely currently to be about the usefulness of the degrees recent grads are getting than AI itself.  The need for people who are engineers and people who actually understand how business and the world work (in AI-speak, the semantic and ontology "layers") will continue for a long, long time.  Trade skills will be valuable, too, and creativity in all cases is difficult for a machine.

3) I wrote the technology position paper for my firm for the previous Trump administration, and UBI is one of the things we pushed back against.  It's not that wealth won't be distributed differently, it's just that money is a reflection of value, especially for humans themselves.  Throwing people money while taking away all sense of purpose is a recipe for disaster, IMHO.  From my personal experience, UBI is a way for centi-millionaires and billionaires to say, "let's just give folks $xx,000 per year so I can go on with my mega-wealthy life and forget about the negative impact I am helping generate." 

What we really need is a 1960s moonshot-like program to get ahead-of-the-curve at helping EVERY citizen become a greater contributor to society in new ways, either using machines or beside machines, but NOT "beneath" machines.  It always amazes me that industry will throw $300M+ at developing or acquiring a new video game, but no one will put this kind of money into a program to study raising the value of all humans as tech continues to advance.

Finally, this is not a US problem, it's a world problem... and it's a GREAT place for the US to lead the way.  Importantly, not as a competitor (outside of Defense naturally), but as a collaborator in enhancing human value, even with those we sometimes mis-trust.

As always, just stellar work... your ability to render the complex into the simpler and more digestible (whatever the subject) is a key strength that is almost impossible to find in other news services.  Keep on rockin' it!