A Response to AI Doomers
While I am not an "AI expert", I thought it would be worthwhile to give my take on the future Matt Shumer’s viral post is forecasting and also add context through the lens of my own personal experience with AI as a marketing professional.
First, this article is quite gloomy. It's resembling more doomer social engagement content incentivized by platforms like X these days. Fear and sensationalism spreads and is rewarded unfortunately.
Having said that, he touches on some realities we must come to grips with, albeit with a little more practicality than he prescribes.
The basic premise of the article is this: AI has crossed a threshold from helpful tool to direct substitute for human cognitive work. Therefore, massive white-collar job loss is imminent within the next few years, and those who are not preparing are already behind.
My counter to this is not that AI is weak, it’s that we should not conflate capability with adoption and deployment, which is much, much slower. Further, we should not extrapolate conclusions for humankind as a whole because of industry biases. For example, software development/tech is by far the most impacted by AI so far.
But let's give him his due. If we think in terms of a human being as a calculator or only capable of similar input/output functions, he may be right. I think we can all agree basic administrative tasks have and will continue to be replaced by autonomous models. We saw this in a positive way in the 70s when computers started doing calculations, and in a (subjectively) negative way when customer service reps began being replaced by answering bots. There may be people who enjoy the latter, but I have not met one.
For many, my own industry comes to the top of the list when describing jobs that may get replaced. Marketing is just writing copy and designing stuff, right?
Let's look at how AI has actually affected by work in the past 5 years of using it:
Ideation: I brainstorm campaign ideas, organize my thoughts, and develop outlines for content. AI content itself...sucks. It lacks uniqueness but also empathy. And if I push back on its proposal, it turns out that its pretty tractable.
Reporting: I feed AI data and ask for summaries, calculations, and insights that can help improve performance. It's often helpful, but not comprehensive due to massive lack of context.
Design: Certain models are capable of producing JPGs that, if skilled, one can take into Adobe and manipulate and combine manually to produce final artwork. I have never used AI-produced media as a final production-ready product, whether it be a post, flyer, presentation, label, reel, logo,...you name it.
Learning: I teach myself new skills such as learning new platforms and best practices. Decent here, but I'm still doing the actual work.
Now ask: If it suffers drawbacks on individual functions like these, how do you think it would perform when doing a job that requires you to do ALL of these simultaneously with shared context and interpersonal skills?
Further, there are the functions which I have not used AI AT ALL yet, such as talking to clients, selling new business, navigating objections, building trust over years, sitting in a room and reading energy. Wouldn't we consider these not minor components of a job or a business?
My point is this: we should focus on what hasn't changed vs. what is changing. Communicating with people and all that entails, requires more than inputs and outputs. It requires emotional intelligence, personal context, principles and values. The kind that you can't program or rewrite in a line of code.
My advice:
Be AI-leveraged, not AI-resistant - Learn to use the tools to your advantage.
Be interested - Chase your passion and learn a variety of cross-functional skills to limit the risk of AI taking over a single function.
Be personal - Be someone people want to be around, connect with, and solve problems.
Yes, AI will compress low level cognitive work, as it always has done, but it will elevate high-trust and high-agency humans.
I remain steadfast in being an optimist for our future, and I think you should be too!
