It seems that for now, Goldman/McKinsey can capture the value of junior people with AI without changing the rate they charge clients.
Assuming there isn’t regulatory capture, Eventually, the costs of these services will go way down. Either Goldman/Mckinsey disrupt their own pricing or someone else does. Maybe that someone else is a current Harvard undergrad (or my preference, a current State college under grad).
There was a recent article in the WSJ interviewing the McKinsey big guy, who described AI intruding into their business as "existential", they were integrating it into their operations, and that it would result in "vast reductions" in their workforce.
When I consider my own career I started off in a job doing unsexy tasks that got filtered down to the entry level. But this allowed me to:
1) Prove myself
2) Learn the things I would need to know to do high level strategy through trial and error doing
Now I'm a high paid strategist, but I could not have become a high paid strategist without that dues paying phase. This is especially true of someone like myself that doesn't come from a privileged background and have generally preferred as little credentialism as I can manage.
I do also wonder to what extent AI was every really necessary to cut some of these jobs. Could it not be the excuse rather then the reason.
Only the junior staff who are already sharp enough to make themselves as valuable as they would be a decade on are going to get a foothold. Fortune favors the brilliant autoidacts who to no small degree get lucky
A neighbor’s daughter’s first job out of college was as a “business consultant”. I think her job history was probably babysitting.
She was a very pretty girl, with a sunny, pleasant personality, who would probably be an asset to an organization in much the way a good secretary once was (and now still is, I’m sure, under some other title).
Part of this is just a refusal to name things.
Her mother, my friend, was in sales, and that too she would have been good at. Maybe that’s the direction she ultimately went.
People will always have a need for a *smart* lawyer.
It’s unlikely most of the people AK is referencing, needed to “become lawyers” and a real sense, likely, in which most of them did not actually do so.
I loathe the AI hype because it implies something new that already is. Technology and machines have been replacing human effort for many decades and will continue to do so. Any task that is repetitive faces extermination and this has been the case for a long time.
The AI hype pretends that machines can now replace less repetitive tasks but this is questionable. For once a machine is allowed to error the question becomes, "How costly are those errors and how much intervention is needed to correct them?"
What I'm seeing is corporations are doing everything they can to offload the costs of errors onto customers who dump those costs on their customers, all to find someone who will accept and live with the costs. Used to be a business that served people placed a priority on responding to customer issues. Not any more! That job, that cost, has been demoted. In the short term the business is saving money. In the long term they are pissing off customers and losing brand loyalty.
Quality of service provided by businesses is in massive decline - I just had a miserable experience at a gas station deli with the result that I have sworn off any business that has kiosk ordering. I can't be the only one to reach this conclusion. I find the entire self ordering system business model to be fundamentally flawed with two fundamental issues: (1) Why am I paying for a product before I know it can be promptly delivered to me? (2) Who is responsible if the business fails to deliver this product? But since I've already paid, the business no longer cares about making sure my order is right! I am just a sucker. Well, I'm tired of being the sucker and so I will refuse to do business with companies who set me up to be one.
The current business environment is thriving off making Americans suckers for bad business practices. Americans are noticing the decay. They are noticing they are being ripped off. When will the "middle men" of service industries realize that "technology solutions" are costing them far more in the long term than what they promised to be saving?
Challenge is the same automated food delivery machinery proliferates the American economy. If one is on the road, the calorie choices are "convenient but of bad quality" or "inconvenient". I generally prefer the inconvenient option but it is not always a viable choice. My complaint is that when the convenient option becomes inconvenient and an utter fail there is no one to take responsibility!
I think we are all, customer and cashier alike, moved to embarrassment by the tip screeen for a counter order at a place you’ve just entered for the first time in your life, and have not yet received anything from. It is, I guess, a tip based on the friendly willingness of the cashier, to accept your business.
I mentally award points to the places that recognize this and still have a tip jar, even if I tip via the screen.
Oh, I know. I was making jokes. Order kiosks are awful and result in everything you note in your comment.
Road food is bad. On any road trip, I take a cooler with at least a few decent food items, although if there is a Popeye's at the rest stop, I'll get the usual 2 piece, red beans and rice, and a biscuit.
Amazon has free returns for most items. I can literally try out a new golf club and, if I don’t like it, I can return it no questions asked. Many other retailers offer the same benefit including Best Buy, Target and Apple. Sorry, but there has never been a better time to be a consumer. I remember the 1980s.
My thought exactly. Quality of service has not only been getting better, it seems to me to be getting better at a faster rate. From Blockbuster to streaming. From Sears to Amazon. From AMC to Tesla. I have even been amazed at how good the California DMV has gotten.
I was rooting with you until you mentioned the CA DMV. We left the state 8 years ago for the sunnier pastures of North Texas. But, even over here, the DMV is kind of a joke. Renew everything online unless you are unable, including those concealed carry permits, which are not really required anymore under our constitutional carry laws.
I’m guessing that the very last entities to adopt AI will be government agencies, which will be to our detriment with some silver linings due to qualified immunity.
I understand. My past experience with DMV’s was horrible. When I moved to California, I logged in online. It told me I was 50th in line and that I needed to show up at the location by 2:10 PM. I did so, was called up by a friendly, smiling rep who helped me in minutes. She then sent me to the even friendlier person administering the tests.
In about 45 minutes I was done. The place was clean, professional and everyone was impressive.
I guess I took the CA DMV for granted for all of these years. Thank you for correcting me. They have offered online appointments and virtual queues since at least 2000 when I purchased my first motorcycle. Good for them!
I just renewed my driver's license and it was worse than I expected, but fortunately they had enough humans to go to with questions that the AI didn't create insurmountable problems. However, the main contribution the AI made was a bigger and worse "voice mail hell." This seems to be the one job AI can do better than a human, at least from the boss's point of view.
I don't expect mechanics or plumbers to be replaced anytime soon. And the universities, just about all of them, need to go away because wokism anyway.
As for lawyers, the Volokh Conspiracy blog collects stories of lawyers that tried to use AI to write their briefs. ChatGPT in particular will gleefully cite cases that never existed, leading to some big fines when the document finds its way in front of a real judge. Besides, if they ever get better, lawyers can use the legal system to limit the competition with themselves, or to create more work for themselves.
No doubt the Blockbuster -> streaming transition radically improved on the convenience dimension of accessing video content. And the variety and quality of content available (at the upper end at least) is much better, and perhaps that has been partially as a result of the business disruptions streaming technology caused. However, compared to the classic cable TV experience, which also can deliver tremendous amounts of live and on-demand content in a more efficient BW footprint, streaming technology's latency is inferior, and with the multiple logins, multiple interfaces, and poorer navigation of streaming, arguably, the TV watching experience with streaming is markedly inferior to that of traditional cable. That said, the cost differential has been enough for me to adopt streaming, despite those annoyances.
How so? I was able to find my daughter inexpensive golf shirts on Amazon with next day delivery. In the 1980s, I was stuck with some mom and pop business that never discounted.
Well, consider that women used to spend a fair amount of time in dressing rooms, putting clothes on and off like a Barbie doll. That virtually doesn’t exist anymore. At least in many places. I don’t know too many women who are satisfied with online shopping. Myself I just go to the well of eBay or Poshmark and order the same vintage things over and over.
My wife respectively disagrees. Her new dressing room is her closet, which she much prefers over the semi public dressing room at some shop. And, if she doesn’t like it, the returns are free. She says, “don’t forget about Nordstrom Rack.”
Well, it’s true that lots of things had changed already. The clothes were not good quality for a lot of years, while they tried to make rayon happen. The department stores became dirty and dreary, things in heaps. Still the case the last time I checked two or three years ago.
Plus I remember being in a mall banana republic around 2005 where the small dressing room was coed, first time I noticed that. And the lady asking me if I needed anything was a guy albeit a gay guy.
This of course doesn’t have one bit to do with “feeling safe” or “being shy”. Or not liking the pleasant enough if slightly chirpy guy.
“Women’s” spaces are just pleasanter and easier when it’s just women in them. Even if it’s just feeling less ridiculous about the activity of dress-up.
Kinda the female analogue of the immortal line from The Simpsons - Marge, hinting: “Homer, he *prefers* the company of men”.
It’s not a subject. I follow so I don’t know if the major clothing retailers and brands are doing well in the Amazon environment.
But another way in which I perceived the effect is that while fashion changed decade by decade in ways that were easy to enumerate, I would say it is not much changing anymore.
That’s not something I miss as I wasn’t any good at being fashionable anyway. But I miss a selection of clothes that I can try on, and not guess, and not incur shipping charges for nothing. Grown women are not buying their clothes on Amazon.
I feel it’s likely that if you queried women who are much greater clotheshorses than I am or ever was, that they would say the same. Clothes have lost their valence. Which is not to say that all young women don’t look nice as they always have.
I get you would rather talk to a person but what you describe sounds more like growing pains than degradation.
I listen to podcasts on Google Home. When Google had a tool to manage people dcasts, it mostly worked good but sometimes they'd do an upgrade and screw something up. For some reason they decided to end that service and I had to chose between spotify and something else. Maybe I chose wrong but the Spotify player is missing many features I liked and used. At some point it will change, hopefully for the better. Or maybe there's another tool I should be using now. Anyway, that kiosk you use will probably change. If it is as bad as you say they will probably eventually lose customers if it doesn't. And if they don't care about getting the order right they will lose customers too.
Simple but obvious question: as a parent of three kids who will (would?) be starting college in the next 2-7 years, how would you advise? They're bright - exactly the sort of people who might have gone to elite schools and might have gotten these sorts of jobs. Maybe not Harvard and McKinsey, but directionally that way. We had already developed qualms about those sorts of schools for other more obvious and odious reasons. What sort of advice would you give parents and children who otherwise would have wound up working with symbols, as our host would put it? I've always thought it's a fool's errand to look too far ahead on the chess board, but I would love some advice from people who might see a few more moves ahead than I can.
People of means, down here - I’ve noticed this trend - are returning to the idea of a family business as much with a view to employment for their kids as to wealth. I don’t know how successful these are going to be and I realize it’s certainly not open to most people.
Doctors will always be in demand. I would expect demand to continue in most engineering disciplines though that seems less certain. Either way, engineers seem acceptable to a lot of employers in other areas.
Send them to school in China. Yeah, I know, go ahead, pile on...
I live in Wuhan. The world is going to need smart people that can interface between China and everywhere else. I wouldn't even say it's necessary to become proficient in Mandarin. It's necessary to understand China, which VERY few do. Our current culture of "China experts" and heaven forbid "Sinologists" are worthless for the necessary interface. Your kids could have a bright future.
Why would Chinese companies want to hire non-Mandarin speaking Westerners to "interface" between China and everywhere else over English speaking Chinese? From what I've seen, Chinese companies or the government either want foreign English teachers or white monkeys they can use for propaganda purposes.
Also, why would an American from a middle-class background or better want to greatly lower their quality of life by moving to China and losing a great deal of their material and cultural comforts in addition to their civil rights?
For the first question, I'm going to guess that a native English speaker ALWAYS knows English better than ESL speakers.
For the second question, to do something different. Most people don't actually care that much about freedom of speech and so on as a daily matter, and the foreigner from a middle class background knows he can always go back home. Any political crimes he commits are more likely (probably) to result in deportation back home than a jail.
I think a native speaker knows English colloquialisms better than an ESL speaker but that isn't really all that helpful for the robotic English needed for international business. The only country I've worked in internationally is Japan though and I know that Japanese don't take learning English as seriously as Chinese elites.
You're probably right about wanting to do something different. My personal take away from spending time in both mainland China and the East Asian countries around it is that I would prefer to spend my limited existence on this planet pretty much anywhere other than mainland China.
I was thinking of user manuals, strange t-shirts, and so on more than international business communications. But I imagine nailing down contracts to mean the same in both languages and cultures requires something more.
Shanghai and Suzhou during one trip and the Beijing/Tianjin area on another. This was about a decade ago so relatively early into Xi's premiership and during what felt like a less politically tense period. It sounds silly but I had just watched the Netflix Marco Polo show before going which featured Kublai Khan's court in Karakorum (Beijing) fighting the Southern Song dynasty. That show was not a masterpiece by any means but it had a very high budget and it captured that peak of Chinese culture so vividly that I was really in the mood for that when I visited.
So when I got there and it was nothing but factories, apartment buildings, gloomy industrial farms, Western luxury stores and American style shopping malls I was underwhelmed to put it mildly. That being said, the Shanghai skyline light show at night from the Bund was impressive. I won't lie I have never really seen anything else like that in my life and I have been to many places. It sort of felt like dangling a shiny object in front of a cat though. I very much preferred Hong Kong and Taipei. They have a sort of more natural mix of grittiness, ultra modernity, and also a better sense of preservation of traditional Chinese culture and values than the places I visited in mainland China. It is sad the CCP seems bent on enforcing its vision of China on those outliers.
I'm getting the impression that China's 'industrial policy' of promoting key high-tech sectors on a priority basis has resulted in an economic system that is inherently geared towards producing substantial overcapacity. For example, reports suggest that the solar panel industry annually produces twice as many solar panels as the world uses, with most of them manufactured in China. The result has been a price war and layoffs in China's solar panel industry. After funneling resources and funding into the industry, the Chinese government apparently has had to reverse course and intervene directly to cull the industry, as the response of producers to market forces appears to be somewhat weak (soft budget constraint). There are also plans to establish a cartel to take care of the problem. Producing stuff for which there is no demand is an inherent waste of resources. Is this pattern going to be repeated in other priority sectors like EV's and batteries? I don't see how this type of system can go on indefinitely.
It can't. Some of it is just job creation to keep people doing something. Some is stupidity. Some of it is just the manic/frantic approach of Chinese to business, where there's headlong leaps into industries without any view to future viability. None of it means China is going away. It will continue to dominate manufacturing and be a force in world affairs.
There are lots of options but don't forget teaching. Can't be automated, pay hits six figures in expensive regions quickly, loans paid off for service. Great vacation schedule and summers off.
Online loons will talk trash but that only adds to the fun.
If you want to optimize for both high floor and a shot at high ceiling, my advisece would be to steer them towards software development - whether they study computer science at college or just learn it on their own.
If they can get into the *most* elite schools, I would still suggest going - hopefully properly forewarned about the wokeness and its dangers - because the signaling value of having gotten in and then graduated is still likely to be worth a whole lot.
If it’s not a truly elite school, then save the money and go to a state school rather than a lesser but still about as expensive private one.
Unless it is truly an elite school and they are self-starters, do encourage them to major in a hard science or at least economics rather than the softer majors, which are simultaneously the most likely to be woke and the least likely to teach them how to think vs what to think.
Guess I spent 35 years teaching the McKinsey tone of voice without knowing it. I had a list of 30 or so Rules that made student write to my 3 Cs -- Clear, Concise, and Comprehensive.
50 years ago, I looked at universities, saw gerry built vocational centers manufacturing bumwads for the economy, didn't want any part of it, and went into the trades, allowing me self employment and freedom from anything related to HR and corporate weasel-dom. The trade education component that's missing is the 2nd step...figuring out freedom. WHICH TRADE, WHERE to place that trade in the market, and how to structure your skill into a small functional business. The blind recommendation of "going into the trades" can be its own mistake.
I could see it coming 50 years ago. I was just mistaken in when it would happen.
it is hard to buck convention and expectations when you are young. The 1960s might be thought a counter-example, but when a significant percentage is all doing the same, and celebrated for it to a great degree, it’s not quite so non-conformist.
Anyway, I came up during the period that was the reaction, whether principled or merely faddish or cyclical, to the sixties. It strikes me as unbelievable (given how much trouble lawyers cause) how much people worshipped the idea of law school then, parents especially. The boys in my grade were cute Alex P. Keatons in their khakis.
In the spring of my senior year of high school, I found one of those big books that put you in touch with seasonal jobs then. I don’t remember it, but this is how it must’ve been because there was no internet. I wrote away and applied for a job with a concessionaire at a national park 1000 miles away. A place I had visited and where I understood I had experienced peace and happiness for one of the few times in my life. I got a letter back telling me to start on June 1st.
One constant of my childhood was that I preferred to be outdoors, always.
In May, I told my parents I would be leaving after graduation to take this job. I remember particularly my mother fastened on the idea that I would be cleaning toilets.
There was a standoff but I allowed my parents to dissuade me from going. It was a bad decision on their part, but they were ever people of little understanding. I chiefly blame myself for not having a stronger will.
I went off to college instead, as they wanted me to, but I never trod that path with much success. I didn’t see them much for some years. Mother later mentioned that my father lied and told people I was in “law school” lol.
I have thought that school, rather than urging people to be whatever they want, which invariably means be a great success in some more or less conventional way - should instead inculcate in people a sense of their limitations. I know that would’ve helped me if others had been honest about me in the way I was fumblingly trying to be with myself as regarded higher education.
This isn’t just a matter of IQ. That was not really my problem. In fact, the day that the school handed out the SAT results to us in class, the buzz all around was, “What did she get?”
Except at the very highest, difference-making level, intelligence is so much less important than temperament and inclination.
I remain skeptical. In the legal space you read about more cases and more filings, including apparently a judge's opinion in a recent case, that are rife with AI hallucinations. I suppose there are ways to mitigate this in the software but it doesn't seem to be happening fast or even seem to be a priority with AI developers. I can see how agents can function as assistants to human workers but wholesale replacement of actual humans with the assumption that the output of the AI Robot is at least as accurate? Not seeing it yet.
You are only looking at the numerator, not the denominator. I have spoken to a large number of practicing attorneys about this, and I was already using AI extensively in my own work before I was ... ahem ... made redundant by them. 10% better quality can't compete with 1,000,000% more quantity. No more copes for me!
The trend is very clear: the market for new junior associates at big law private firms is already imploding and we're just getting started. While the absolute number of bad hallucinations might still be rising, if you look at the trend of them divided by the explosion in the use of AI to make legal documents, the percent is dropping like a rock.
First of all, the anti-hallucination tools and checks are rapidly getting much better. I predict legal hallucinations won't be a major story anymore and few will even remember it was ever a big issue by 2028.
But also, perceptions are also skewed by the fact that these are eyeballs-and-attention grabbing stories that get signal-boosted and reported far our of proportion to their actual occurrence because the story targets the very heart of people's livelihoods in the sense of their strong desire for coping rationalization pretty lies that tell them they won't soon be replaced by computers. Which we will be.
One could probably make a good deal of money over the next year or two by creating a niche publication or substack or whatever just selling people these copes. Ha, "Copestack!" The market for that particular kind of confirmation bias is potentially huge! I mean, so long as those people are still earning incomes to pay for the subscriptions.
Call me old fashioned but I use AI to filter out the ads on YouTube. I could tolerate the ads until the point that *they* decided to optimize those ads for every possible scenario, including in the middle of songs. And then I declared war.
Spot on about newly-hired McKinsey consultants. When I asked a friend who is one what he told his clients when they asked what they should be doing in positioning their firms given current market dynamics, he responded, "Oh that's for the higher-ups. I just tell them how they can save on expenses."
I've known quite a few "Harvard" grads, and HONESTLY most of them should have gone to community college (with them paying for it while working shit jobs) while paying for their own subsistence. That will give you an education that far surpasses anything you could get at an Ivy league school that your folks had to "bribe" corrupt school administrators to "get you in"!
Book smart is FANTASTIC, but "the school of Hard Knock's" is better for most, because "you learn faster"! (Unless it's STEM, go into the trades where AI won't woop your ass!)
“There will be less drive for efficiency in government and non-profits, so job availability will still be there.” But the efficiency of government will lag further and further behind that of private business. The pressure for more and more government operations to be privatized will be irresistible.
All jobs based on digital data or work can be done by ai faster & more accurately.
UBI is terrible, but a Universal Guaranteed govt job offer is realistic, with far more benefits and lower costs to subsidise the low skilled jobs. Somewhat supervised by ai.
Computer involved entertainment, like e-sports & video games, will also increase.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported a net gain of 73,000 jobs in total nonfarm payroll employment in July 2025 which reflected a decline of 12,000 in federal government employment.
During the same month, federal government employment declined by 12,000 jobs. Since January,
federal government employment is down a measly 84,000 since January 2025. What we really want to see are declines in federal government employment large enough to produce net declines in overall employment. This would help the federal government budgetary situation and tamp down inflation at no cost to the private economy.
Given the enormous amount of routine processing work that occupies hundreds of thousands of federal government employees, one might reasonably expect AI to be easily adapted to reduce total federal government employment substantively by numbers in the hundreds of thousands. But as we all know, the political lobbying strength of federal employees and the total absence of Congressional backbone with respect to fiscal responsibility has created a Great Wall of inefficiency that has prevented meaningful reforms for decades and will continue to do so until the not so distant future when the national debt finally destroys the nation for good.
The Department of Defense has some 950,000 civilian employees among its various personnel systems. One of its critical missions apparently is running a global hotel chain that has numerous clerical job openings around the world:
The Department of Veterans Affairs has over 400,000 something employees. And it has already formed internal bureaucracies devoted to slow-rolling AI:
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/veterans-affairs-tests-using-ai-to-tackle-82645-unprocessed-claims-619224 VA has a long history of reinventing the wheel internally, so who knows, maybe they will come up with an AI app that actually achieves something. But if the decades long, hundreds of billion dollar unsuccessful to come up with an electronic health record that both DOD and VA could use is any indicator, we won’t be seeing any budgetary savings from AI in VA at any time ever but will wind up throwing big money down what will be an endless rabbit hole of unsuccessful projects.
You can do the math for yourself with Department of Homeland Security passport and visa processing, the Social Security Administration and its tens of thousands of paper-pushers, the Patent and Trademark Office and the countless other bureaucracies mired in ancient processing traditions and unable to modernize. A lot of this can be blamed on Chesterton’s Hoarding Disorder (DSM5 300.3 (F42)) in which no efficiencies can be implemented due to a mountain of statutory and regulatory slop that is barely decipherable but cannot be eliminated because no one knows why it is there in the first place. But a lot of it is simple self-serving behavior: when one reads a couple of Government Performance and Results Act performance plans, one quickly notices that a top priority in every agency is maintaining the agency’s workforce.
At any rate, Trump and Musk’s best efforts aside, federal civilian employment will continue to be the Works Progress Administration for Harvard grads until either Article I is replaced with something viable or the country goes bellyup.
I would bet their pain will be mostly disruptive, maybe a little about opportunities. The real pain will come at less selective schools.
On a related note, lots of ivy and peer institution grads go to Wall St and finance. I would guess those jobs wouldn't be affected as much but IDK. Thoughts?
"For example, in maintaining this substack, I do a lot of repetitive work digesting other substacks, extracting quotes, and formatting links. Instead, I could use a software tool to do this. If you are just starting out as a writer, work on finding or developing such tools."
If your goal were production, that would ring true. I would expect what you do is more labor of love than production. That means that AI can help with those tasks, and especially finding new sources, and maybe do the menial tasks completely but if you take full advantage of what it offers I fear you will lose interest in the enterprise.
AI allows us to learn more quickly. With AI, a novice can become competent within hours. Solutions that formerly eluded for years can be found within minutes. Productivity will zoom upward.
What work will not be affected by AI? I use AI for almost everything now. From making better sandwiches, choosing movies, finding better books, buying tools, planning vacations, designing metal structures, checking grammar, obtaining facts during dinner conversation, and brainstorming titles for Substack posts.
Hardware is hard, leadership is messy, and AI will make us better and more productive at both.
AI knows nothing so how can it make things better? Who decides what is better? Who is actually in charge?
The AI fever seems to relish the idea that humans are inconveniences. Yet it is only humans who appreciate being alive! Allow the machines to "take over" and humans become an inefficiency and what is to stop the machines from "concluding" fewer humans would be an improvement?
AI helps by providing me and others with information. I can decide what is better, as can anyone. I’m in charge of a minuscule slice of the universe. Other people and other things are in charge of similarly minuscule slices.
AI will not bring about a step function of doom, but rather tiny step functions of benefit and cost. As these step functions occur, each individual can adjust the way AI is used and implemented. Change will be gradual.
This isn’t to say that AI cannot be dangerous. We should amend our constitutions by taking into account the dangers of AI. We should treat AI like we treat religion. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of AI or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. We should point out that AI is not mentioned in the Constitution—hence government funding of AI should be prohibited by the Tenth Amendment.
We just need to enforce the law that the owners of AI systems are liable for the damages those machines cost. Alas, corporate lobbyists will see to it that the AI profiteers are protected from liability just as the pharma profiteers and corporate agriculture profiteers are protected.
If an HP calculator is wrong, and causes damage, I agree.
Recently, I took vacation advice from chatGPT that turned out to be poor, and my family members were let down. I should have known better.
So I see a difference between a calculator and AI. One is giving advice. What’s your clearest case of AI causing damage that you would hold its owners liable for?
It seems that for now, Goldman/McKinsey can capture the value of junior people with AI without changing the rate they charge clients.
Assuming there isn’t regulatory capture, Eventually, the costs of these services will go way down. Either Goldman/Mckinsey disrupt their own pricing or someone else does. Maybe that someone else is a current Harvard undergrad (or my preference, a current State college under grad).
There was a recent article in the WSJ interviewing the McKinsey big guy, who described AI intruding into their business as "existential", they were integrating it into their operations, and that it would result in "vast reductions" in their workforce.
They know what's coming.
When I consider my own career I started off in a job doing unsexy tasks that got filtered down to the entry level. But this allowed me to:
1) Prove myself
2) Learn the things I would need to know to do high level strategy through trial and error doing
Now I'm a high paid strategist, but I could not have become a high paid strategist without that dues paying phase. This is especially true of someone like myself that doesn't come from a privileged background and have generally preferred as little credentialism as I can manage.
I do also wonder to what extent AI was every really necessary to cut some of these jobs. Could it not be the excuse rather then the reason.
Only the junior staff who are already sharp enough to make themselves as valuable as they would be a decade on are going to get a foothold. Fortune favors the brilliant autoidacts who to no small degree get lucky
A neighbor’s daughter’s first job out of college was as a “business consultant”. I think her job history was probably babysitting.
She was a very pretty girl, with a sunny, pleasant personality, who would probably be an asset to an organization in much the way a good secretary once was (and now still is, I’m sure, under some other title).
Part of this is just a refusal to name things.
Her mother, my friend, was in sales, and that too she would have been good at. Maybe that’s the direction she ultimately went.
People will always have a need for a *smart* lawyer.
It’s unlikely most of the people AK is referencing, needed to “become lawyers” and a real sense, likely, in which most of them did not actually do so.
I loathe the AI hype because it implies something new that already is. Technology and machines have been replacing human effort for many decades and will continue to do so. Any task that is repetitive faces extermination and this has been the case for a long time.
The AI hype pretends that machines can now replace less repetitive tasks but this is questionable. For once a machine is allowed to error the question becomes, "How costly are those errors and how much intervention is needed to correct them?"
What I'm seeing is corporations are doing everything they can to offload the costs of errors onto customers who dump those costs on their customers, all to find someone who will accept and live with the costs. Used to be a business that served people placed a priority on responding to customer issues. Not any more! That job, that cost, has been demoted. In the short term the business is saving money. In the long term they are pissing off customers and losing brand loyalty.
Quality of service provided by businesses is in massive decline - I just had a miserable experience at a gas station deli with the result that I have sworn off any business that has kiosk ordering. I can't be the only one to reach this conclusion. I find the entire self ordering system business model to be fundamentally flawed with two fundamental issues: (1) Why am I paying for a product before I know it can be promptly delivered to me? (2) Who is responsible if the business fails to deliver this product? But since I've already paid, the business no longer cares about making sure my order is right! I am just a sucker. Well, I'm tired of being the sucker and so I will refuse to do business with companies who set me up to be one.
The current business environment is thriving off making Americans suckers for bad business practices. Americans are noticing the decay. They are noticing they are being ripped off. When will the "middle men" of service industries realize that "technology solutions" are costing them far more in the long term than what they promised to be saving?
As your nutritional adviser, I strongly advise stopping consumption of gas station deli food.
Is gas station sushi still ok? 😂
HA! I was trying to figure out a way to work gas station sushi into the joke, but went the material presented.
No, it wasn't, isn't, and never will be OK.... :-)
Challenge is the same automated food delivery machinery proliferates the American economy. If one is on the road, the calorie choices are "convenient but of bad quality" or "inconvenient". I generally prefer the inconvenient option but it is not always a viable choice. My complaint is that when the convenient option becomes inconvenient and an utter fail there is no one to take responsibility!
I think we are all, customer and cashier alike, moved to embarrassment by the tip screeen for a counter order at a place you’ve just entered for the first time in your life, and have not yet received anything from. It is, I guess, a tip based on the friendly willingness of the cashier, to accept your business.
I mentally award points to the places that recognize this and still have a tip jar, even if I tip via the screen.
Oh, I know. I was making jokes. Order kiosks are awful and result in everything you note in your comment.
Road food is bad. On any road trip, I take a cooler with at least a few decent food items, although if there is a Popeye's at the rest stop, I'll get the usual 2 piece, red beans and rice, and a biscuit.
Amazon has free returns for most items. I can literally try out a new golf club and, if I don’t like it, I can return it no questions asked. Many other retailers offer the same benefit including Best Buy, Target and Apple. Sorry, but there has never been a better time to be a consumer. I remember the 1980s.
My thought exactly. Quality of service has not only been getting better, it seems to me to be getting better at a faster rate. From Blockbuster to streaming. From Sears to Amazon. From AMC to Tesla. I have even been amazed at how good the California DMV has gotten.
I could go on for hours…
I was rooting with you until you mentioned the CA DMV. We left the state 8 years ago for the sunnier pastures of North Texas. But, even over here, the DMV is kind of a joke. Renew everything online unless you are unable, including those concealed carry permits, which are not really required anymore under our constitutional carry laws.
I’m guessing that the very last entities to adopt AI will be government agencies, which will be to our detriment with some silver linings due to qualified immunity.
I understand. My past experience with DMV’s was horrible. When I moved to California, I logged in online. It told me I was 50th in line and that I needed to show up at the location by 2:10 PM. I did so, was called up by a friendly, smiling rep who helped me in minutes. She then sent me to the even friendlier person administering the tests.
In about 45 minutes I was done. The place was clean, professional and everyone was impressive.
I guess I took the CA DMV for granted for all of these years. Thank you for correcting me. They have offered online appointments and virtual queues since at least 2000 when I purchased my first motorcycle. Good for them!
I just renewed my driver's license and it was worse than I expected, but fortunately they had enough humans to go to with questions that the AI didn't create insurmountable problems. However, the main contribution the AI made was a bigger and worse "voice mail hell." This seems to be the one job AI can do better than a human, at least from the boss's point of view.
I don't expect mechanics or plumbers to be replaced anytime soon. And the universities, just about all of them, need to go away because wokism anyway.
As for lawyers, the Volokh Conspiracy blog collects stories of lawyers that tried to use AI to write their briefs. ChatGPT in particular will gleefully cite cases that never existed, leading to some big fines when the document finds its way in front of a real judge. Besides, if they ever get better, lawyers can use the legal system to limit the competition with themselves, or to create more work for themselves.
The whole mess makes me wish I'd grown up Amish.
No doubt the Blockbuster -> streaming transition radically improved on the convenience dimension of accessing video content. And the variety and quality of content available (at the upper end at least) is much better, and perhaps that has been partially as a result of the business disruptions streaming technology caused. However, compared to the classic cable TV experience, which also can deliver tremendous amounts of live and on-demand content in a more efficient BW footprint, streaming technology's latency is inferior, and with the multiple logins, multiple interfaces, and poorer navigation of streaming, arguably, the TV watching experience with streaming is markedly inferior to that of traditional cable. That said, the cost differential has been enough for me to adopt streaming, despite those annoyances.
True in some ways. The ease of getting books, for instance. Parts for appliances.
But I feel like the women’s clothing market has been broken.
How so? I was able to find my daughter inexpensive golf shirts on Amazon with next day delivery. In the 1980s, I was stuck with some mom and pop business that never discounted.
Well, consider that women used to spend a fair amount of time in dressing rooms, putting clothes on and off like a Barbie doll. That virtually doesn’t exist anymore. At least in many places. I don’t know too many women who are satisfied with online shopping. Myself I just go to the well of eBay or Poshmark and order the same vintage things over and over.
My wife respectively disagrees. Her new dressing room is her closet, which she much prefers over the semi public dressing room at some shop. And, if she doesn’t like it, the returns are free. She says, “don’t forget about Nordstrom Rack.”
Well, it’s true that lots of things had changed already. The clothes were not good quality for a lot of years, while they tried to make rayon happen. The department stores became dirty and dreary, things in heaps. Still the case the last time I checked two or three years ago.
Plus I remember being in a mall banana republic around 2005 where the small dressing room was coed, first time I noticed that. And the lady asking me if I needed anything was a guy albeit a gay guy.
This of course doesn’t have one bit to do with “feeling safe” or “being shy”. Or not liking the pleasant enough if slightly chirpy guy.
“Women’s” spaces are just pleasanter and easier when it’s just women in them. Even if it’s just feeling less ridiculous about the activity of dress-up.
Kinda the female analogue of the immortal line from The Simpsons - Marge, hinting: “Homer, he *prefers* the company of men”.
Homer: “Well who doesn’t?”
It’s not a subject. I follow so I don’t know if the major clothing retailers and brands are doing well in the Amazon environment.
But another way in which I perceived the effect is that while fashion changed decade by decade in ways that were easy to enumerate, I would say it is not much changing anymore.
That’s not something I miss as I wasn’t any good at being fashionable anyway. But I miss a selection of clothes that I can try on, and not guess, and not incur shipping charges for nothing. Grown women are not buying their clothes on Amazon.
I feel it’s likely that if you queried women who are much greater clotheshorses than I am or ever was, that they would say the same. Clothes have lost their valence. Which is not to say that all young women don’t look nice as they always have.
I get you would rather talk to a person but what you describe sounds more like growing pains than degradation.
I listen to podcasts on Google Home. When Google had a tool to manage people dcasts, it mostly worked good but sometimes they'd do an upgrade and screw something up. For some reason they decided to end that service and I had to chose between spotify and something else. Maybe I chose wrong but the Spotify player is missing many features I liked and used. At some point it will change, hopefully for the better. Or maybe there's another tool I should be using now. Anyway, that kiosk you use will probably change. If it is as bad as you say they will probably eventually lose customers if it doesn't. And if they don't care about getting the order right they will lose customers too.
Simple but obvious question: as a parent of three kids who will (would?) be starting college in the next 2-7 years, how would you advise? They're bright - exactly the sort of people who might have gone to elite schools and might have gotten these sorts of jobs. Maybe not Harvard and McKinsey, but directionally that way. We had already developed qualms about those sorts of schools for other more obvious and odious reasons. What sort of advice would you give parents and children who otherwise would have wound up working with symbols, as our host would put it? I've always thought it's a fool's errand to look too far ahead on the chess board, but I would love some advice from people who might see a few more moves ahead than I can.
People of means, down here - I’ve noticed this trend - are returning to the idea of a family business as much with a view to employment for their kids as to wealth. I don’t know how successful these are going to be and I realize it’s certainly not open to most people.
Pretend college doesn't exist and is not an option. Go from there.
Doctors will always be in demand. I would expect demand to continue in most engineering disciplines though that seems less certain. Either way, engineers seem acceptable to a lot of employers in other areas.
Send them to school in China. Yeah, I know, go ahead, pile on...
I live in Wuhan. The world is going to need smart people that can interface between China and everywhere else. I wouldn't even say it's necessary to become proficient in Mandarin. It's necessary to understand China, which VERY few do. Our current culture of "China experts" and heaven forbid "Sinologists" are worthless for the necessary interface. Your kids could have a bright future.
You asked...
Why would Chinese companies want to hire non-Mandarin speaking Westerners to "interface" between China and everywhere else over English speaking Chinese? From what I've seen, Chinese companies or the government either want foreign English teachers or white monkeys they can use for propaganda purposes.
Also, why would an American from a middle-class background or better want to greatly lower their quality of life by moving to China and losing a great deal of their material and cultural comforts in addition to their civil rights?
For the first question, I'm going to guess that a native English speaker ALWAYS knows English better than ESL speakers.
For the second question, to do something different. Most people don't actually care that much about freedom of speech and so on as a daily matter, and the foreigner from a middle class background knows he can always go back home. Any political crimes he commits are more likely (probably) to result in deportation back home than a jail.
I think a native speaker knows English colloquialisms better than an ESL speaker but that isn't really all that helpful for the robotic English needed for international business. The only country I've worked in internationally is Japan though and I know that Japanese don't take learning English as seriously as Chinese elites.
You're probably right about wanting to do something different. My personal take away from spending time in both mainland China and the East Asian countries around it is that I would prefer to spend my limited existence on this planet pretty much anywhere other than mainland China.
I was thinking of user manuals, strange t-shirts, and so on more than international business communications. But I imagine nailing down contracts to mean the same in both languages and cultures requires something more.
That's interesting. When and where were you in the PRC?
Shanghai and Suzhou during one trip and the Beijing/Tianjin area on another. This was about a decade ago so relatively early into Xi's premiership and during what felt like a less politically tense period. It sounds silly but I had just watched the Netflix Marco Polo show before going which featured Kublai Khan's court in Karakorum (Beijing) fighting the Southern Song dynasty. That show was not a masterpiece by any means but it had a very high budget and it captured that peak of Chinese culture so vividly that I was really in the mood for that when I visited.
So when I got there and it was nothing but factories, apartment buildings, gloomy industrial farms, Western luxury stores and American style shopping malls I was underwhelmed to put it mildly. That being said, the Shanghai skyline light show at night from the Bund was impressive. I won't lie I have never really seen anything else like that in my life and I have been to many places. It sort of felt like dangling a shiny object in front of a cat though. I very much preferred Hong Kong and Taipei. They have a sort of more natural mix of grittiness, ultra modernity, and also a better sense of preservation of traditional Chinese culture and values than the places I visited in mainland China. It is sad the CCP seems bent on enforcing its vision of China on those outliers.
I'm getting the impression that China's 'industrial policy' of promoting key high-tech sectors on a priority basis has resulted in an economic system that is inherently geared towards producing substantial overcapacity. For example, reports suggest that the solar panel industry annually produces twice as many solar panels as the world uses, with most of them manufactured in China. The result has been a price war and layoffs in China's solar panel industry. After funneling resources and funding into the industry, the Chinese government apparently has had to reverse course and intervene directly to cull the industry, as the response of producers to market forces appears to be somewhat weak (soft budget constraint). There are also plans to establish a cartel to take care of the problem. Producing stuff for which there is no demand is an inherent waste of resources. Is this pattern going to be repeated in other priority sectors like EV's and batteries? I don't see how this type of system can go on indefinitely.
It can't. Some of it is just job creation to keep people doing something. Some is stupidity. Some of it is just the manic/frantic approach of Chinese to business, where there's headlong leaps into industries without any view to future viability. None of it means China is going away. It will continue to dominate manufacturing and be a force in world affairs.
There are lots of options but don't forget teaching. Can't be automated, pay hits six figures in expensive regions quickly, loans paid off for service. Great vacation schedule and summers off.
Online loons will talk trash but that only adds to the fun.
If you want to optimize for both high floor and a shot at high ceiling, my advisece would be to steer them towards software development - whether they study computer science at college or just learn it on their own.
If they can get into the *most* elite schools, I would still suggest going - hopefully properly forewarned about the wokeness and its dangers - because the signaling value of having gotten in and then graduated is still likely to be worth a whole lot.
If it’s not a truly elite school, then save the money and go to a state school rather than a lesser but still about as expensive private one.
Unless it is truly an elite school and they are self-starters, do encourage them to major in a hard science or at least economics rather than the softer majors, which are simultaneously the most likely to be woke and the least likely to teach them how to think vs what to think.
Just my two bits.
Guess I spent 35 years teaching the McKinsey tone of voice without knowing it. I had a list of 30 or so Rules that made student write to my 3 Cs -- Clear, Concise, and Comprehensive.
50 years ago, I looked at universities, saw gerry built vocational centers manufacturing bumwads for the economy, didn't want any part of it, and went into the trades, allowing me self employment and freedom from anything related to HR and corporate weasel-dom. The trade education component that's missing is the 2nd step...figuring out freedom. WHICH TRADE, WHERE to place that trade in the market, and how to structure your skill into a small functional business. The blind recommendation of "going into the trades" can be its own mistake.
I could see it coming 50 years ago. I was just mistaken in when it would happen.
I saw it 40 years ago but made the wrong choice at the time.
it is hard to buck convention and expectations when you are young. The 1960s might be thought a counter-example, but when a significant percentage is all doing the same, and celebrated for it to a great degree, it’s not quite so non-conformist.
Anyway, I came up during the period that was the reaction, whether principled or merely faddish or cyclical, to the sixties. It strikes me as unbelievable (given how much trouble lawyers cause) how much people worshipped the idea of law school then, parents especially. The boys in my grade were cute Alex P. Keatons in their khakis.
In the spring of my senior year of high school, I found one of those big books that put you in touch with seasonal jobs then. I don’t remember it, but this is how it must’ve been because there was no internet. I wrote away and applied for a job with a concessionaire at a national park 1000 miles away. A place I had visited and where I understood I had experienced peace and happiness for one of the few times in my life. I got a letter back telling me to start on June 1st.
One constant of my childhood was that I preferred to be outdoors, always.
In May, I told my parents I would be leaving after graduation to take this job. I remember particularly my mother fastened on the idea that I would be cleaning toilets.
There was a standoff but I allowed my parents to dissuade me from going. It was a bad decision on their part, but they were ever people of little understanding. I chiefly blame myself for not having a stronger will.
I went off to college instead, as they wanted me to, but I never trod that path with much success. I didn’t see them much for some years. Mother later mentioned that my father lied and told people I was in “law school” lol.
I have thought that school, rather than urging people to be whatever they want, which invariably means be a great success in some more or less conventional way - should instead inculcate in people a sense of their limitations. I know that would’ve helped me if others had been honest about me in the way I was fumblingly trying to be with myself as regarded higher education.
This isn’t just a matter of IQ. That was not really my problem. In fact, the day that the school handed out the SAT results to us in class, the buzz all around was, “What did she get?”
Except at the very highest, difference-making level, intelligence is so much less important than temperament and inclination.
I remain skeptical. In the legal space you read about more cases and more filings, including apparently a judge's opinion in a recent case, that are rife with AI hallucinations. I suppose there are ways to mitigate this in the software but it doesn't seem to be happening fast or even seem to be a priority with AI developers. I can see how agents can function as assistants to human workers but wholesale replacement of actual humans with the assumption that the output of the AI Robot is at least as accurate? Not seeing it yet.
You are only looking at the numerator, not the denominator. I have spoken to a large number of practicing attorneys about this, and I was already using AI extensively in my own work before I was ... ahem ... made redundant by them. 10% better quality can't compete with 1,000,000% more quantity. No more copes for me!
The trend is very clear: the market for new junior associates at big law private firms is already imploding and we're just getting started. While the absolute number of bad hallucinations might still be rising, if you look at the trend of them divided by the explosion in the use of AI to make legal documents, the percent is dropping like a rock.
First of all, the anti-hallucination tools and checks are rapidly getting much better. I predict legal hallucinations won't be a major story anymore and few will even remember it was ever a big issue by 2028.
But also, perceptions are also skewed by the fact that these are eyeballs-and-attention grabbing stories that get signal-boosted and reported far our of proportion to their actual occurrence because the story targets the very heart of people's livelihoods in the sense of their strong desire for coping rationalization pretty lies that tell them they won't soon be replaced by computers. Which we will be.
One could probably make a good deal of money over the next year or two by creating a niche publication or substack or whatever just selling people these copes. Ha, "Copestack!" The market for that particular kind of confirmation bias is potentially huge! I mean, so long as those people are still earning incomes to pay for the subscriptions.
Call me old fashioned but I use AI to filter out the ads on YouTube. I could tolerate the ads until the point that *they* decided to optimize those ads for every possible scenario, including in the middle of songs. And then I declared war.
Della Brown ended it all for me.
https://youtu.be/Ys__bHhhl6Q?si=j-VkPc5SHK0gl0u_
Right.
Spot on about newly-hired McKinsey consultants. When I asked a friend who is one what he told his clients when they asked what they should be doing in positioning their firms given current market dynamics, he responded, "Oh that's for the higher-ups. I just tell them how they can save on expenses."
I've known quite a few "Harvard" grads, and HONESTLY most of them should have gone to community college (with them paying for it while working shit jobs) while paying for their own subsistence. That will give you an education that far surpasses anything you could get at an Ivy league school that your folks had to "bribe" corrupt school administrators to "get you in"!
Book smart is FANTASTIC, but "the school of Hard Knock's" is better for most, because "you learn faster"! (Unless it's STEM, go into the trades where AI won't woop your ass!)
“There will be less drive for efficiency in government and non-profits, so job availability will still be there.” But the efficiency of government will lag further and further behind that of private business. The pressure for more and more government operations to be privatized will be irresistible.
All jobs based on digital data or work can be done by ai faster & more accurately.
UBI is terrible, but a Universal Guaranteed govt job offer is realistic, with far more benefits and lower costs to subsidise the low skilled jobs. Somewhat supervised by ai.
Computer involved entertainment, like e-sports & video games, will also increase.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported a net gain of 73,000 jobs in total nonfarm payroll employment in July 2025 which reflected a decline of 12,000 in federal government employment.
During the same month, federal government employment declined by 12,000 jobs. Since January,
federal government employment is down a measly 84,000 since January 2025. What we really want to see are declines in federal government employment large enough to produce net declines in overall employment. This would help the federal government budgetary situation and tamp down inflation at no cost to the private economy.
Given the enormous amount of routine processing work that occupies hundreds of thousands of federal government employees, one might reasonably expect AI to be easily adapted to reduce total federal government employment substantively by numbers in the hundreds of thousands. But as we all know, the political lobbying strength of federal employees and the total absence of Congressional backbone with respect to fiscal responsibility has created a Great Wall of inefficiency that has prevented meaningful reforms for decades and will continue to do so until the not so distant future when the national debt finally destroys the nation for good.
The Department of Defense has some 950,000 civilian employees among its various personnel systems. One of its critical missions apparently is running a global hotel chain that has numerous clerical job openings around the world:
https://dodciviliancareers-dev.online14.net/administrativemanagementsupport In the private sector, of course, hotels have faced competitive pressure to achieve efficiency through AI (https://www.netsuite.com/portal/resource/articles/business-strategy/ai-hospitality.shtml ) in particular in reducing front desk staffing, but one hates to hazard a guess as to when such efficiencies will ever be attempted in DOD hotels or in the countless other such critical missions that DOD undertakes rather than winning wars. One thing is certain, you will never see a DOD congressional budget justification identifying staffing cuts enabled by AI.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has over 400,000 something employees. And it has already formed internal bureaucracies devoted to slow-rolling AI:
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/veterans-affairs-tests-using-ai-to-tackle-82645-unprocessed-claims-619224 VA has a long history of reinventing the wheel internally, so who knows, maybe they will come up with an AI app that actually achieves something. But if the decades long, hundreds of billion dollar unsuccessful to come up with an electronic health record that both DOD and VA could use is any indicator, we won’t be seeing any budgetary savings from AI in VA at any time ever but will wind up throwing big money down what will be an endless rabbit hole of unsuccessful projects.
You can do the math for yourself with Department of Homeland Security passport and visa processing, the Social Security Administration and its tens of thousands of paper-pushers, the Patent and Trademark Office and the countless other bureaucracies mired in ancient processing traditions and unable to modernize. A lot of this can be blamed on Chesterton’s Hoarding Disorder (DSM5 300.3 (F42)) in which no efficiencies can be implemented due to a mountain of statutory and regulatory slop that is barely decipherable but cannot be eliminated because no one knows why it is there in the first place. But a lot of it is simple self-serving behavior: when one reads a couple of Government Performance and Results Act performance plans, one quickly notices that a top priority in every agency is maintaining the agency’s workforce.
At any rate, Trump and Musk’s best efforts aside, federal civilian employment will continue to be the Works Progress Administration for Harvard grads until either Article I is replaced with something viable or the country goes bellyup.
"My prediction for Harvard undergrads? Pain"
I would bet their pain will be mostly disruptive, maybe a little about opportunities. The real pain will come at less selective schools.
On a related note, lots of ivy and peer institution grads go to Wall St and finance. I would guess those jobs wouldn't be affected as much but IDK. Thoughts?
"For example, in maintaining this substack, I do a lot of repetitive work digesting other substacks, extracting quotes, and formatting links. Instead, I could use a software tool to do this. If you are just starting out as a writer, work on finding or developing such tools."
If your goal were production, that would ring true. I would expect what you do is more labor of love than production. That means that AI can help with those tasks, and especially finding new sources, and maybe do the menial tasks completely but if you take full advantage of what it offers I fear you will lose interest in the enterprise.
AI allows us to learn more quickly. With AI, a novice can become competent within hours. Solutions that formerly eluded for years can be found within minutes. Productivity will zoom upward.
What work will not be affected by AI? I use AI for almost everything now. From making better sandwiches, choosing movies, finding better books, buying tools, planning vacations, designing metal structures, checking grammar, obtaining facts during dinner conversation, and brainstorming titles for Substack posts.
Hardware is hard, leadership is messy, and AI will make us better and more productive at both.
My prediction: less pain for everyone.
AI knows nothing so how can it make things better? Who decides what is better? Who is actually in charge?
The AI fever seems to relish the idea that humans are inconveniences. Yet it is only humans who appreciate being alive! Allow the machines to "take over" and humans become an inefficiency and what is to stop the machines from "concluding" fewer humans would be an improvement?
AI helps by providing me and others with information. I can decide what is better, as can anyone. I’m in charge of a minuscule slice of the universe. Other people and other things are in charge of similarly minuscule slices.
AI will not bring about a step function of doom, but rather tiny step functions of benefit and cost. As these step functions occur, each individual can adjust the way AI is used and implemented. Change will be gradual.
This isn’t to say that AI cannot be dangerous. We should amend our constitutions by taking into account the dangers of AI. We should treat AI like we treat religion. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of AI or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. We should point out that AI is not mentioned in the Constitution—hence government funding of AI should be prohibited by the Tenth Amendment.
We just need to enforce the law that the owners of AI systems are liable for the damages those machines cost. Alas, corporate lobbyists will see to it that the AI profiteers are protected from liability just as the pharma profiteers and corporate agriculture profiteers are protected.
If an HP calculator is wrong, and causes damage, I agree.
Recently, I took vacation advice from chatGPT that turned out to be poor, and my family members were let down. I should have known better.
So I see a difference between a calculator and AI. One is giving advice. What’s your clearest case of AI causing damage that you would hold its owners liable for?