Letter to a Young Person Worrying About AI - Commoncog

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This was written as a post in the Commoncog members forum, as a response to a young person worried about AI making young knowledge workers obsolete.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://commoncog.com/letter-to-a-young-person-worrying-about-ai
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I should note for non-members reading this — since this comment thread is publicly available and displayed beneath the essay — “wait, watch, and adapt” doesn’t mean “sit and do nothing”. It means being very careful with your information sources, running experiments, and seeking out good field reports. And of course, it means ignoring hype, noise and prediction, whilst focusing on sensemaking.

Sensemaking is basically a fancy way of saying “making sense of things that are already happening” — things you can observe to be true today — as opposed to trying to predict what will happen tomorrow. This is a more useful frame because you’re being conservative. You’re just looking for an organising theory for evidence that’s already in front of you.

I should also note that seeing the present moment clearly is actually quite difficult in its own way, but it’s certainly more tractable than trying to predict the future.

(Members, of course, already know this — we’ve talked about this in the original (private) thread).

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I have some thoughts on this, to offer a broader economic lens on the labour market anxieties:

  1. Part of the anxiety comes from the tech firms themselves. They overcommitted hiring during the pandemic. Layoffs were already on the way post-lockdowns. The AI hype in late 2022 was convenient. Giving everyone a singular factor–a devil–to pin the blame on. Big tech gets a re-roll, hide their missteps behind AI adoption, and still gets to rake in capital. I’d probably avoid any news in the tech space, just to keep my content consumption (and my own thinking) clean.
  2. The market was warped by ZIRP. For a long time, the Fed sets rates pretty low. Effectively offsetting the opportunity costs of capital. Taleb (in his inimitable way) goes as far as saying people have no concept of the time value of money. Post-Covid, rates went hiking to curb inflation, this policy regime sent ripples throughout markets. The government + institutions have outsized influence on things (by design), but in ways that I feel people don’t quite appreciate or notice.
  3. Tech Adoption is funny. New things made obsolete by newer things. Yet. some things just don’t seem to die. E.g. the global financial infrastructure still runs on COBOL. It’s like classical Latin to Modern English. Most of the experts have already aged out of the labour force. Sure, there’s AI trained on COBOL (1 ,2), but they still require programmers versed in the language to work on problems in this space. I think the problem becomes a matter of overlapping and transferable skill sets (a good place to start thinking about building moats).

Optimistic take: Suppose the AI boom turns out great. Data centers and related infrastructure need to be built and maintained ← you need raw materials, capital and of course workers. There’s opportunity: new tech or innovations emerge, jobs we have no clue about being created, perhaps a meaningful change in economic structure.

Doomer take: Suppose this AI bubble bursts within <2 years. As the market corrects itself, we go through pain well into the 2030s. That’s a scenario, I think, everyone would rather avoid. Given how much resources (capital and attention) are concentrated in the AI space. Other sectors, that could have benefited from those same resources, won’t have the capacity to absorb this shock. This could be a fate worse than the jobs-apocalypse trumpeted by evangelists of the new AGI genesis.

The truth probably lies somewhere in-between, and with it a whole space of opportunities.

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