Will People Have Jobs?

Not too long ago, Joe Biden was signing the Chips Act.

Not too far from now, Biden or his successor might be signing the ‘Human People Act.’

As you listen to people talking about the practical realities of AI, there’s a consensus that we need to focus on the role of humans, especially in the job market.

A friend of mine, Jeremy Wertheimer, touched on this in one of his recent lectures to audiences looking to understand what we’re moving through now in this crossroads of technology.

He started by dating himself and the rest of us who have seen most of this evolution occur over our lifetimes.

“I used to watch Star Trek,” he said. “I used to get books out of the library with pictures of real robots – in factories, welding car frames, and I thought: ‘this is really cool – this is going to be fun’ – at some point, I wonder what jobs people will do, if the computers and robots do everything.”

Ultimately, he decided, it was a long way off. Wertheimer went into electrical engineering, which he said made sense, because he was used to playing around with electronics.

“We learned how to analyze circuits,” he said. “We would tell these stories: we were engineers – we could explain things to you.”

Later, he said, innovators built programs that could analyze circuits.

He himself worked on an early program for molecular cell biology.

Then he went into entrepreneurship, and then on to Google…

Fast forward to ‘pi day’ of this past year, March 14, and the emergence of the new chatGPT model.

That, he said, was the final point where he realized: we really need to look at jobs.

“It wasn’t just me,” he said, citing input from major firms like Goldman Sachs.

With that background established, Wertheimer talked about some solutions.

“As a society, what should we do?” he asked. “We need to train kids to look at these technologies, to understand them, to use them, so that they are not caught unawares.”

In terms of policy, he said, we could benefit from a UBI.

“It’s not a bad idea – it’ll probably take a while,” he said.

Another way to address company automation, he suggested, is to incentivize businesses correctly.

“I think this is a business issue,” he said, using the example of pollution. “It’s now unacceptable to be polluting like crazy, and say: ‘I’m just optimizing for the bottom line.’ We now demand that you also worry about taking care of the planet!”

Now, this isn’t the first time that I’ve written about this: you can look back in the blog, and see my friend’s remarks from Davos this past January, which ran in somewhat the same vein. But I really think we need to be paying attention to this!

“We need to think a little bit about employment,” he said in conclusion. “There are decisions we make all the time … I think we need to start to optimize humanity.”

Touche.

I just Googled ‘making jobs for people’ and got a bunch of stuff about what jobs people prefer, or what types of jobs are best for what kind of people.

But we need a “People Act,” or something, to make sure that in the next generation, given the same economic structure that we have now, people will still have jobs to do.