As with most new technologies, what humans expected turned out to be very different from what they got. “All the creative jobs will be safe. After all, you have to pull from so many sources to do those!” But now tens of thousands of entirely AI-generated articles, images, and videos hit the web every day.
“You can never replace coders! Coders are the future!” Yet besides superficial creativity, AI is also good at very narrowly defined tasks…like coding. Want a pricing table for your sales page? A script to analyze a database? No problem! And now many software engineers are breaking into a sweat.
Meanwhile, the people everyone thought might be the first to go are thriving. Project managers, program managers, business administrators and executive assistants, for example. As it happens, for all the menial tasks they complete, like following up with people on project deadlines, booking flights, and dealing with processes, all those tasks involve humans—and humans react differently to humans than to robots.
If you think about it, we’ve had “AI” for project management for years. Asana sends reminders about due tasks every day when you get close to or go past the deadline. That’s automated project management. It just doesn’t work—because you know what I and everyone else at my and many other companies is doing: ignoring the reminders. Nobody cares if a robot pokes them about a report that’s overdue. But if a human asks the question? Yikes! That’s different.
I’m not sure chatbots or otherwise slightly smoother robots will change that. Put the AI into a humanoid robot, and…maybe? Then again, Sonny won’t care either if you tell him to scram, and you already know it before he exists. Humans want to interact with humans. The nature of those interactions changes all the time, but the fact that those interactions are a baseline of collaboration doesn’t.
Perhaps just like most other big revolutions, AI will play out the way new technology generally does: It’ll change everything a little more than you’re comfortable with—but also a little less than you think it will.
