Pretty much everyone in tech agrees that generative AI, Large Language Models and ChatGPT are a generational change in what we can do with software, and in what we can automate with software. There isn’t much agreement on anything else about LLMs – indeed, we’re still working out what the arguments are – but everyone agrees there’s a lot more automation coming, and entirely new kinds of automation. Automation means jobs, and people. This is also happening very fast: ChatGPT has (apparently) over 100m users after just six months, and this data from Productiv suggests it’s already a top-dozen ‘shadow IT’ app. So, how many jobs is this going to take, how fast, and can there be new jobs to replace them? We should start by remembering that we’ve been automating work for 200 years. Every time we go through a wave of automation, whole classes of jobs go away, but new classes of jobs get created. There is frictional pain and dislocation in that process, and sometimes the new jobs go to different people in different places, but over time the total number of jobs doesn’t go down, and we have all become more prosperous.
Full analysis : Whether AI will destroy, displace, create, and accelerate jobs in the coming years like other waves of automation, or if this time is different.
