Friday brought with it a staggeringly negative jobs report... This means that the last 3 months have been the weakest job creation period since COVID. Markets suffered.
“we should start channeling young people to resilient opportunities that will exist in the real world for years to come.” Suggestion: EcoRestoration - physical work - to address what we’ve been calling the “climate crisis.” Search “biodiversity for a liveable climate.”
Love the idea, but who’s going to pay for EcoRestoration? Are the multibillion dollar corporations responsible for most of the environmental destruction really going to suffer being taxed to repair the damage they’ve done?
You raise a thoughtful question. Universal Basic Income raises the same question. If we could get there, we would all sleep better at night. Young people yearn for meaningful work; it’s killing their spirits to have to work for the corporations that are doing the damage. We need a better system, and we need to figure it out. We’re the grownups.
Universal Basic Income would go a long way to support able bodied young people with a head on their shoulders and eyes to see the present emergency. Young people often want meaningful work, not just a paycheck - especially if it’s a paycheck for work that actually makes the current crisis worse.
Will be very interesting to see whether AI is hitting the jobs report, as opposed to tariffs, political instability, or something else. I'm a lawyer--AI is changing the way we work, especially legal research, but I don't see any indication that firms have slowed hiring associates or that companies are relying on law firms any less. The social network (using that phrase to have positive meaning) that validates and advises and litigates and exercises judgment is still essential.
This is super important. At the Young People's Alliance, our recent-grad members are seeing entry-level hiring disappear firsthand. We're working on a policy framework to create more white-collar and blue-collar apprenticeships to solve the entry-level gap and give people automation-resistant skills. Would love to talk more about this. See you at the phone free party!
Grim post. My son just finished his third summer with the Los Angeles Fire Department Junior Lifeguard program. A few months ago I thought it was a great activity for him to build skills, develop discipline, and round out those college applications! Now my husband and I are encouraging him to go through the full lifeguard academy once he graduates high school as a great supplemental income option that can flex in terms of time commitment. Apparently top LA lifeguards make upwards of $300k! Ocean-proof life-saving robots may be in our future but I'm guessing farther away than other displacing technologies.
On the upside, granted from a niche techno-optimist perspective, I'm seeing a lot of renewed hope in my AI vibe-coding group for non-coders, especially after our first demo day today. One is a non-technologist non-coding sales guy building his first multi-sided ai-powered app and his sense of empowerment is off the charts. I predict we'll see a wave of innovation and entrepreneurship for those that adapt to the new world and lean in to learning these new skills. Diverse perspectives, especially from those that understand niches well and the unsolved problems within them, will have a louder voice now when the primary coding language is actually English.
This is one of the most clear-eyed pieces on this I’ve read.
If your job is mostly fill-in-the-blank tasks, think of it as “auto-complete” from AI eliminating the role.
Consider the 8 major enterprise areas of concern - Revenue - generating Sales, Marketing, Product Design, Supply Chain; and control - Finance, HR, IT and Support.
Control areas - most of Finance, HR, IT and Support are full-in-the-blank. Three-way-match in Finance, most application configuration in IT… ouch.
Sales is a little, Marketing is a lot, Product Design is a little, Supply Chain is a lot.
I’ve been studying task analysis and process design and control for almost 4 decades.
That this is true in almost all companies, is the other shock.
It’s especially true of roles which manipulate text - software configuration, contract generation, purchase orders, sales proposals, reviewing resumes, billing documents, project planning, marketing collateral, job offers - the fill in the blank is endless. These tasks will be done between 100x and 1000x faster according to measurements I’ve made the last two years.
Flow will be automated with text manipulation steps with AI, only exception management will be staffed. The quality of work will go up 2 orders of magnitude and repeatability of flow near 100%.
When work quality nears 100%, even demand for AI automation will drop. That’s the strangest part.
Orders are configured correctly once, contracts are correct at first revision; proposals are perfect, purchase orders, match contracts invoices and invoices 99% of the time, it systems are tested once, and so on.
It’s going to be a bloodbath for accounting firms, legal and research for then next 2 years.
A mid-level SAP integration script 15 seconds to write at a quality exceeding human capability. For a typical complex ERP add-on project it could finish all integrations, test plans and installation scripts in 15 minutes, not 15 weeks.
I constructed a tool which, using AI, wrote a personally customized training manual for channel sales, with illustrations, including factual instruction and role-play in 30 minutes instead of a week - customized, tailored to employee experience.
It took me 4 hours to write a tool set using AI to extract key entities from contacts, POs, and invoices and do three-way match. Even complex invoices for logistics with surcharges, accessorials and other special terms. It could handle 50,000 documents per hour with sufficient OpenAI licenses. It was adequate to replace all FP&A (Freight Payment & Audit) companies I’ve worked with, simultaneously. At $25 an invoice (going rate) it would generate $1M an hour in billing.
A lot of people will retire, Argentinian, Indian, Romanian and Filipino support and IT groups will be crushed.
Non-physical labor will be biased to people who learn and problem-solve fast, and can manipulate AI’s efficiently.
“we should start channeling young people to resilient opportunities that will exist in the real world for years to come.” Suggestion: EcoRestoration - physical work - to address what we’ve been calling the “climate crisis.” Search “biodiversity for a liveable climate.”
Love the idea, but who’s going to pay for EcoRestoration? Are the multibillion dollar corporations responsible for most of the environmental destruction really going to suffer being taxed to repair the damage they’ve done?
You raise a thoughtful question. Universal Basic Income raises the same question. If we could get there, we would all sleep better at night. Young people yearn for meaningful work; it’s killing their spirits to have to work for the corporations that are doing the damage. We need a better system, and we need to figure it out. We’re the grownups.
Universal Basic Income would go a long way to support able bodied young people with a head on their shoulders and eyes to see the present emergency. Young people often want meaningful work, not just a paycheck - especially if it’s a paycheck for work that actually makes the current crisis worse.
Will be very interesting to see whether AI is hitting the jobs report, as opposed to tariffs, political instability, or something else. I'm a lawyer--AI is changing the way we work, especially legal research, but I don't see any indication that firms have slowed hiring associates or that companies are relying on law firms any less. The social network (using that phrase to have positive meaning) that validates and advises and litigates and exercises judgment is still essential.
Yeah we will see. I agree that law firms and their senior partners will still be in demand for judgment, experience and reputation.
This is super important. At the Young People's Alliance, our recent-grad members are seeing entry-level hiring disappear firsthand. We're working on a policy framework to create more white-collar and blue-collar apprenticeships to solve the entry-level gap and give people automation-resistant skills. Would love to talk more about this. See you at the phone free party!
See you there!
Grim post. My son just finished his third summer with the Los Angeles Fire Department Junior Lifeguard program. A few months ago I thought it was a great activity for him to build skills, develop discipline, and round out those college applications! Now my husband and I are encouraging him to go through the full lifeguard academy once he graduates high school as a great supplemental income option that can flex in terms of time commitment. Apparently top LA lifeguards make upwards of $300k! Ocean-proof life-saving robots may be in our future but I'm guessing farther away than other displacing technologies.
On the upside, granted from a niche techno-optimist perspective, I'm seeing a lot of renewed hope in my AI vibe-coding group for non-coders, especially after our first demo day today. One is a non-technologist non-coding sales guy building his first multi-sided ai-powered app and his sense of empowerment is off the charts. I predict we'll see a wave of innovation and entrepreneurship for those that adapt to the new world and lean in to learning these new skills. Diverse perspectives, especially from those that understand niches well and the unsolved problems within them, will have a louder voice now when the primary coding language is actually English.
This is one of the most clear-eyed pieces on this I’ve read.
If your job is mostly fill-in-the-blank tasks, think of it as “auto-complete” from AI eliminating the role.
Consider the 8 major enterprise areas of concern - Revenue - generating Sales, Marketing, Product Design, Supply Chain; and control - Finance, HR, IT and Support.
Control areas - most of Finance, HR, IT and Support are full-in-the-blank. Three-way-match in Finance, most application configuration in IT… ouch.
Sales is a little, Marketing is a lot, Product Design is a little, Supply Chain is a lot.
I’ve been studying task analysis and process design and control for almost 4 decades.
That this is true in almost all companies, is the other shock.
It’s especially true of roles which manipulate text - software configuration, contract generation, purchase orders, sales proposals, reviewing resumes, billing documents, project planning, marketing collateral, job offers - the fill in the blank is endless. These tasks will be done between 100x and 1000x faster according to measurements I’ve made the last two years.
Flow will be automated with text manipulation steps with AI, only exception management will be staffed. The quality of work will go up 2 orders of magnitude and repeatability of flow near 100%.
When work quality nears 100%, even demand for AI automation will drop. That’s the strangest part.
Orders are configured correctly once, contracts are correct at first revision; proposals are perfect, purchase orders, match contracts invoices and invoices 99% of the time, it systems are tested once, and so on.
It’s going to be a bloodbath for accounting firms, legal and research for then next 2 years.
I see it very similarly.
You’re a lot more positive than I am.
A mid-level SAP integration script 15 seconds to write at a quality exceeding human capability. For a typical complex ERP add-on project it could finish all integrations, test plans and installation scripts in 15 minutes, not 15 weeks.
I constructed a tool which, using AI, wrote a personally customized training manual for channel sales, with illustrations, including factual instruction and role-play in 30 minutes instead of a week - customized, tailored to employee experience.
It took me 4 hours to write a tool set using AI to extract key entities from contacts, POs, and invoices and do three-way match. Even complex invoices for logistics with surcharges, accessorials and other special terms. It could handle 50,000 documents per hour with sufficient OpenAI licenses. It was adequate to replace all FP&A (Freight Payment & Audit) companies I’ve worked with, simultaneously. At $25 an invoice (going rate) it would generate $1M an hour in billing.
A lot of people will retire, Argentinian, Indian, Romanian and Filipino support and IT groups will be crushed.
Non-physical labor will be biased to people who learn and problem-solve fast, and can manipulate AI’s efficiently.