AI and the Future: Part 3 Career Advice in an AI Driven economy.

Not long after reading Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World by Parmy Olson, as mentioned in part 1, I was taking my 2 eldest children to school one morning. Longtime readers of this blog will know that the names of Finn aged 17, and Florence age 14, combine to make the “Flinn” in Melber Flinn. Finn was sat in the back cramming for an exam but Flo was sat next to me in the front.

“Please tell me another story from the 1990s she said!”

Not this morning I replied, thinking this was a perfect opportunity to dispense some parental wisdom. “We should probably have a bit of a chat about AI and what it will mean for your career options…”

I have recently been thinking a lot about what career advice I give to my kids, at 17 Finn is closer to finishing education and entering the working world so a: he has less time to plan for an AI driven economy and b: there are less years for it to advance around him. Flo will be a famous actress so she is sorted, but Lila is 7. She is still learning her times table so she certainly isn’t thinking about careers yet but if she asks me at some point what job she should do I am not quite sure what to say. What jobs will even be available in the AI driven economy in 2036 when she is 18?!

Imagine if you were born in 2001, and at the age of 10 you fall in love with computers, in 2017 you take GCSE computing and then in 2019 you head to university to study for a degree in software engineering. You graduate in 2022 and come into the job market just as Chat GPT is released. In May 2023 companies like IBM announce a hiring pause on any software testing jobs as they recognise the potential of AI, and by 2025, Microsoft confirm they have cut 6000 jobs, many in software engineering and development because AI is now doing an increasing proportion of the company’s coding workload.

How can I predict what jobs will be available in 2036 and how early can you focus or divert your educational path to avoid those occupations which are at greatest risk of disappearing because of AI?!

Anyway, back to the school run and my conversation with Flo…

She asked what I career advice I wanted to give her, so I set the scene and gave her a concise summary of the growth of AI and a brief assessment as to what the future will hold. To illustrate my points I explained how AI is increasingly taking on tasks that humans can do at an equal to or better competency level. The conversation went a little like this:

Steve: “Imagine Melber Flinn as a business of just me and 10 AI agents. I could ask them to identify the top 100 highest growth companies in a specific industry, research their senior leadership teams and scrape the web for their contact details and then proactively contact then via email or with calls to market our services. The agents could take a brief on a role and then map the candidate side of the market, contacting them on LinkedIn, process advertising response, initiate marketing campaigns and request candidate recommendations. How cool is that!?”

Flo: “But would the agents be like humanoid robots?”

Steve: “No sweetheart, the AI agents would effectively sit in the same application on my laptop and I could give each one a set of distinct tasks and instructions. I could give them a human avatar for video calls but otherwise they would only exist virtually.”

Flo: “That’s so cool dad, let me logout of Tiktok so I can listen to you more intently!”

Steve: “Not only that Flo but the agents would work 24/7, they wouldn’t get tired, they wouldn’t forget to respond to an e-mail, in fact they would respond near instantaneously. A human might take half an hour to respond to 10 important emails, the AI agent would understand and respond to each one simultaneously and within a matter of seconds”.

Flo: “So Dad, if your agents are doing all the work, what would you role be?”

Steve: “Well I would manage the agents, I would direct and guide them and give them instructions. And when they complete each task or project I would give them a new one but given I can scale both the number of agents, plus the fact that they also work many times faster than the average human we could multiply the amount of business we do by a factor of 10 or 50 or even 100, but at a fraction of the cost of employing the same number of humans to do the same thing!”

Flo: “But dad, if AI agents are taking all the jobs humans used to do surely there won’t be any humans left to place and the recruitment industry will just die…?”

Steve: “…….”

Steve: “You’re wearing too much makeup today”.