Raise your hand if you’ve heard someone say this in the past month? <all hands raise simultaneously>.
Depending who you are, you see AI as this amazing, revolutionary tool that will help us move forward as a civilization faster than we have before. Alternatively, you might see AI as this big, scary demon that’s going to take over the world and take all our jobs. Personally, I prefer to hold the more optimistic point of view that AI will move us forward and actually create way MORE jobs for mere mortals.
Did you know that 85% of employment growth in the last 80 years came from new jobs? i.e. jobs that didn’t exist before (thanks to My First Million Podcast and Steph Smith for that stat). Think about it; in the early 2000s a job as a social media manager, UX designer, Android or iOS developer didn’t exist. Even the world’s biggest companies today like Google, Meta and Amazon didn’t exist until the 90s or 00s and they now employ tens of thousands of people around the world!
So if you ask me, everyone needs to just calm down a bit. AI might take some traditional jobs – just like the electronic toll collection points took the jobs of those manning toll booths, and automatic boom gates took the jobs of the people who would collect your ticket in the car park of the local shopping centre – but at the end of the day AI is going to create so many new jobs that we have never even dreamed of. So in 20 years from now I don’t expect my kids to be Copywriters. I expect they’ll be ‘AI 3 Personalisation Technicians’… or freelancers.
