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Sarah O'Connor (FT) asks what happens when AI removes basic work from which new/junior staff learn the ropes?
One source she consulted 'wondered if we might one day see a return of the old apprenticeship system that existed in much of Europe before the industrial revolution, in which families who could afford it would pay for their offspring to be apprenticed to a master. The implications of this for social mobility — already not great in many professions — go without saying'!
Like internships in publishing and ?? now?
Publishing had a lot of tedious semi-skilled work automated away a generation ago; is it a worked example of this?
Broadly I'd say 'yes'....
@ChrisMayLA6 Oh fun, AI will usher in a whole new old realm of striated society where only the fancy rich children get to do apprenticeships just like these techbros want, a new feudalist system.
I was thinking about this the other day
I'm an accountant with 20 years experience
I was talking to a CFO the other day who wants to bring in AI for reconciliations (a fairly basic, slightly tedious, incredibly important task)
I no longer do reconciliations myself, but I review those done by other people, and the reason I'm good at reviewing them is because over the first 10 years of my career I did thousands of them (not an exaggeration, literally thousands)
1/2
If this work is automated away from people in their early careers, then they will never be good at reviewing them, whether they're prepared by a person or an AI
So in just a few decades, the accountants with 20 years experience won't be able to do the work of a senior accountant because they didn't learn the work of a junior accountant
yes, O'Connor cites accountancy as one of the professions so impacted; in exactly the way your experience suggests
@ChrisMayLA6 I think schools will have to improve, and, there will be some kind of apprentice system. Companies hiring mid-level staff will also either have to pay more, or lower their expectations.
Schools & universities will certainly have to be more attentive to the 'mid-career' skills required if that is where people's real-world careers are going to (now) start in some professions - it may also required firms to offer a 'foundation' training cycle at the start of employment - which implies tying staff into a contract to cover the costs (a sort of indentured employment?)
@ChrisMayLA6 I think this already exsits in some places.
I was actually thinking about that concept myself... taking in students, educating them within a company, and if they leave without finishing, charging them, and if they stay for a year or two, writing off the education expense. I think this type of schooling might have a viable future, since it allows the company to tailor the training exactly to their own products and processes.
The Q. for the prospective employee I guess is what is the trade off between knowledge acquisition & firm-specific non-transferable education... but perhaps this is not so much a recent problem?
@ChrisMayLA6 Within the IT field it definitely exists. On the other hand, there are a few giants (Microsoft, Amazon, Google) who are so big that you can live an entire workinglife within their ecosystem.
One of the core improvements we'd have to see is people have to accept that school has to be hard, and people are going to flunk out or drop out if they don't make the grade. School needs to be hard, and it needs to be structured to produce great men with skills, not people with pieces of paper saying they have skills.
I don't just mean university, either. The fact that you need a university degree for jobs that don't have anything to do with a university education is caused by wasting kids time and everyone's money at the elementary and high school level.
People focus on AI, but reality is there's a sort of fantasy where westerners aren't competing with the rest of the world. You can hire people from parts of Africa or Asia for much less than the cost of a GPU, and that's the lowest common denominator entry level employees need to compete with.
Because we've mismanaged global civilization so badly, we're already on a path to global population collapse as bad as the black death. Things will be much harder than today in a few decades as a result, and nobody seems to realize it yet. The positive part of demographic collapse is that there's a potential for great improvements to the power and material conditions of the working class. It happened in the past after the black death and the world wars, it could happen again. When there's so many fewer people there's more opportunities for who's left -- AI or not.
@sj_zero @ChrisMayLA6 Schools today have become playgrounds where people waste their time.
I think one important point, and you raise it, is that school needs to be hard. People need to learn the value of work, and the nature of work.
On the level of society, smartphones and the dopamine kicks need to be removed. They are destryoing students too.
Then, as you correctly say, people need to learn that a degree is not necessary for a lot of work.
I do not believe in a population collapse.
@sj_zero @ChrisMayLA6 I believe, due to the current fertility crisis, in a stagnating population, possibly a slight population decline, but I do not believe in a dramatic collapse.
I think the world will reach some kind of equilibrium at some point. I read one estimate that thought the equilibrium will be reached at around 12 billion.
But that will be handled by increased automation, massive investments in nuclear power, and advances in robotics.
Yes, I'm a long term optimist! ;)
@ChrisMayLA6 @sj_zero True. I think that's actually true, when I think of it.
Can't be easy to be a leftist. Certainly not fun. ;)
@ChrisMayLA6 This problem already exists all over the place. Younger techies often don't have a good mental model for how a computer works, because they did not grow up using the command line or hacking around in BASIC.
Some Asian airline pilots are not great at manual flying because there is no general aviation culture in those countries, and they rarely manually fly an airliner.
New cars are getting so much driver assistance that someone who learns on one, is likely to crash an older car.