Will AI take our jobs?

Let’s try to untangle this controversial subject and speculate about the future of work.

As a starting point we can look at the words of two great thinkers:

AI will take all our jobs and few new ones will be created

Susskind, D. (2020). A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond. Metropolitan Books

AI is redefining “routine” tasks and taking over both manual and cognitive jobs, posing a risk to up to half of all jobs; while it can create unforeseen tasks and jobs, there’s no guarantee of sufficient job replacement, necessitating a revamp in education and training to focus on fostering creativity, emotional intelligence, and lifelong learning.

AI will take current jobs but create better new ones

Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI | Lex Fridman Podcast

The introduction of AI may cause job turnover, but it ultimately leads to more jobs and higher wages, as AI-driven efficiencies lower prices and spur new demand, creating new enterprises; however, there’s a need for individuals to adapt and acquire new skills, often aided by AI, to thrive in these changing circumstances.

The billion-dollar question is of course whether AI will create more jobs that it takes. I will refrain from taking a stance here, but instead focus on the arguments Susskind and Andreessen have in common and what you can do to improve your chances in both scenarios.

AI will take over tasks, not jobs

Your job consists of several tasks and the AI automation process targets tasks not the full job.

AI will start automating tasks that are repetitive, predictable, and require low cognitive engagement. But it will not stop there, we already today see AI taking on tasks that need creativity, problem-solving and considerable cognitive engagement, like data analysis, report writing and generating photos/illustrations (AI pretty good with creativity see Automating creativity — by Ethan Mollick — One Useful Thing).

Leaving social interaction and deep thinking to us humans. As AI advances, it will automate more advanced tasks, leading to changes in job-roles. We already see how e.g., Microsoft is trying to improve AI capability for social interaction to another level with project Rumi (Project Rumi — Microsoft Research)

What about my job?

• If your job consists of a few similar tasks, then your entire role is likely to be automated by AI in the near future.
• If your job involves a variety of different tasks and social interactions, then your role is likely to continue existing, but being re-defined since AI will take over much of your routine tasks. Note: today, writing a report is considered a routine task!

A full day of deep thinking?

The complex stuff, deep thinking, is left to us humans — this is a different beast compared to tackling routine tasks.

Our capacity for deep thinking is limited, doing cognitively “easy” tasks makes it possible for us to do 8–10 hour work days. In a future where AI assists us with all the easy tasks, our workday must be optimized for deep thinking and look quite different.

Deep thinkers such as Yuval Harari and Warren Buffet are known for spending a lot of time meditating and reading. I’m not sure if my manager would be happy with me spending 4 hours meditating and reading each workday…But our brains are not wired for 8 hours of constant complex thoughts.

We must throw away many of the current conceptions when structuring the new workdays, if we do it the right way, the future might turn out bright.

Start preparing now!

It’s crucial now, more than ever, for us to set the strategy and tactics for:

• Embracing Lifelong Learning: We must spend more time studying for each unit of output, each day is a day for learning.
• Developing Non-Automatable Skills: Skills like critical thinking, creativity, and emotional intelligence. The term non-automatable skills are highly dynamic and we must be agile.
• Adapt and Be Flexible: The work landscape is changing, and we need to be prepared and open to change. This might mean changing our career paths or adopting new ways of working.

Conclusion

Will there be work for everyone? There will be fewer “easy” tasks to perform, forcing us to re-define jobs. AI won’t steal our jobs, but it will change them, requiring us to adapt and evolve more and quicker. We have a big chance of turning this into something positive for all of us.

AI in Project Management: A Community Perspective

Last week I posted on AI and Project Management, it sparked an amazing amount of attention, by my standards it “went viral” 🥳

For you who read it, thank you for your engagement through reactions and comments 🙌 I’m overwhelmed of all your positive energy 😊

Your insights, opinions, and thoughtful reflections enriched the conversation and inspired me to devote more of my time to understanding, navigating, and helping with this paradigm shift.

Reading all of your comments many times, it felt like a snapshot of how the community thinks about AI right now and worth a its own summary.

Here it is - the comments viewed from a few perspectives 😀

🌟 How do you feel about AI?

The general sentiment in the comments was overwhelmingly positive to AI! A sentiment analysis of the comments revealed:

• Positive: 41 comments
• Negative: 2 comments
• Neutral: 9 comments

Everyone has buckled up and looking forward to enjoying the ride!

📈 Expected Positive Aspects of AI in Project Management

The comments highlighted several promising aspects:

• Efficiency Improvement: Automating tasks to save time.
• Enhanced Forecasting: Utilizing data for better planning.
• Innovation: Exploring new applications and solutions.

Curious, what will you use all the saved time for?

❗ Concerns Regarding AI in Project Management

Some concerns were raised:

• Limited Transformative Impact? Need to see qualitative improvements.
• Uncertainties: Realization of actual benefits and impact.

There is a lot of talking going on and you (and me) want to see hard facts! Does it really kill those admin tasks?

💡 Good Ideas and Tips found in the comments

📚Reading and exploring

• "Mastering The Dynamics of Innovation" by James Utterback
• "Understanding Practical Project Management" (Haufe, 2023), by Peter Taylor
• https://www.routledge.com/AI-and-the-Project-Manager-How-the-Rise-of-Artificial-Intelligence-Will/Taylor/p/book/9781032006574
• https://DolphinGPT.ai
• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joejustice_3-prompts-to-use-chatbots-for-learning-activity-7094065009424543744-e1MD?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

🙌 Communities

• https://www.meetup.com/London-Project-Data-and-Analytics-meetup/

🛠️ Tools / apps to try

• Keto Software
• Taskade
• Sembly AI

🔮 Something to think about…

Gary Lloyd lifted a perspective worth pondering about.

“Doing the wrong thing efficiently is not just a waste—it's a missed opportunity. As AI transforms project management, we must look beyond mere process controls and automation.”

How do we do it right? What lies beyond automating the current way of working? What is the true paradigm shift?

Conclusion

We are positive, excited, curious and optimistic about the transformative potential of AI.

What is your next step on this journey? What would you like help with?

Looking forward continue sharing thoughts and experiences with you! 🌟

Eye opener from Yuval Harari!

 🎙️ Lex Friedman, one of my absolute favorite podcast hosts, has recently interviewed the historian Yuval Harari (author of books like Sapiens and Homo Deus). A thought provoking interview - give it a listen!

At the end of the interview, Lex asks Yuval for advice to young people how to have a successful career.

🎯 The answer is profound and applies to companies as well as individuals…

(For a full quote answer please listen to the podcast)

Yuval:

It’s the first time in history nobody has any idea how the world would look like in 10 years. … Throughout history, it was never possible to predict the future. But the basic structures of life will not change. Most people will still be peasants. Armies would fight on horseback with swords and bows and arrows and things like that. So you could learn a lot from the wisdom of your elders. They’ve been there before and they knew what kind of basic skills you need to learn.

Now we have no idea how the job market would look like in 10 years. We have no idea what skills will still be needed.

So the most important skill is the skill to keep learning and keep changing throughout our lives, which is very, very difficult. To keep reinventing ourselves.

Traditionally, people thought about education like building a stone house with very deep foundations. Now it’s more like setting up a tent that you can fold and move to the next place very, very quickly.

…

🤔 How do you feel about reinventing yourself? What about your company? Do you focus on stability or agility?

#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies | Lex Fridman Podcast

AI: The Game Changer We Can't Ignore

I recently listened to podcast from Microsoft Worklab, with Ethan Mollick, a professor at The Wharton School who's is known for e.g. integrating AI into his curriculum since early 2023 and for his Substack "One Useful Thing" where he translate academic research into useful business insights.

A few key ideas that stood out:
1️⃣ AI is Transformative and Here to Stay: AI isn't just another tech trend. It's a general-purpose technology impacting every aspect of our lives, even if all AI development stopped today.
2️⃣ Working with AI: Imagine AI as a collaborator not as a google search box. It’s an entity that can help you refine drafts, suggest improvements, or lend a more formal tone to your language. The biggest AI use cases could well be in writing documents and conducting research, promising significant productivity gains. What does it mean for you and your organisation?
3️⃣ A Task-level Revolution: AI will not replace jobs - but tasks. Jobs are bundles of tasks, and AI is perfectly suited to take over some of these tasks. The shift isn't necessarily at the job level; it's more about changing how we handle tasks.
4️⃣ Work will change: Large corporations with lots of layers of middle management are built on the technologies and capabilities we have today. That will change since we have different capabilities now. Are you still going to do sprints as the way of organizing work? When AI can structure your work. We have to change how we work, which will be huge.

🚀 And a few ways to get the ball rolling!

1️⃣ Start Small and Encourage Experimentation: Begin with integrating AI into manageable tasks. This could be as simple as automating email responses or scheduling meetings. It's crucial to foster an environment that encourages experimentation with AI.
2️⃣ Time and Training: Understanding and effectively using AI requires time and training. A rough estimate is around 10 hours of hands-on experience before gaining real value from AI.
3️⃣ Inclusivity in Adoption: As we integrate AI into our organizations, it's crucial to ensure that adoption is inclusive and beneficial for all employees. This might mean providing additional support for those less tech-savvy or ensuring that AI tools are accessible to all.

💚 AI's future in our workplaces isn't just about the technology; it's about people, processes, and potential. What are your thoughts on this? and how do you plan to integrate AI into your workflow? I'd love to hear from you.

🥳 A final challange
Mollick suggests an interesting idea: motivate your most creative people to use AI for a week and reward the best automation idea. This challenge could inspire new ways to leverage AI within your organization. Do you think that would make sense in your organisation?

The future of work?!

A few weeks ago, Microsoft (MS) released their annual Work Trend Index Report. A good read for leaders and curious minds probing the future of work trends. With platforms like M365 and LinkedIn, MS accesses lots of data on current trends, which, combined with 31,000 interviews, yields a substantial basis for their report.

📝My one-paragraph summary
Today we're submerged in more data (meetings, emails, chats, PowerPoints,…) than we can manage. This overload prevents innovative work. AI is the lifeline we need to improve productivity and we must all learn how to use it effectively. Now.

👀Now, let's dive deeper into some topics

🗣 Communication - More talk less do.
Interestingly, we spend 57% of our time on communication and only 43% on creation. Most of this communication (60%) is text-based (emails and chats), yet we view meetings as the largest roadblock to productivity.

🚧 Top 5 roadblocks to productivity:
1. Inefficient meetings
2. Lack of clear goals
3. Excessive meetings
4. Feeling uninspired
5. Difficulty in finding required information

🧐 But why do meetings, supposedly collaborative platforms, become productivity barriers? Let's speculate.

❓Could it reflect our action bias, where we feel more productive when actively doing something (like composing emails) rather than listening in a meeting?

❓Could it be linked to our desire for increased autonomy (self-determination theory) - we can choose when to write emails and chats, but we're usually invited to meetings set in time?

❓Could it be FOMO, where we join meetings to avoid missing out on “crucial” information?

💬 What's your take? Are you swamped with meetings? What's your ideal balance between meetings and focused work? Do you find emails and chats more efficient than meetings?

🆘 How can AI help?
AI can certainly help streamline meetings. The report outlines a few common difficulties in meetings:

✅ Catching up if joining late (57%),
✅ Understanding the next steps (55%), and
✅ Summarizing the meeting (56%)

AI excels at summarizing, so these issues should soon be solved.

Also, AI might reduce the need for information exchange meetings by making information easier to access. It's often simpler to call for a meeting than search for information on the intranet.

🎓 Up-skilling - The Way Forward
About 70%-80% of the interviewees welcome AI's help and believe it will boost creativity and reduce administrative work. But this shift requires new skills.

The top 3 "new" skills for this new era of work:
1. Analytical judgment
2. Flexibility
3. Emotional intelligence

Who needs to up-skill? Everyone.
"82% of leaders in our survey say their employees will need new skills to be prepared for the growth of AI.”

How are you planning for the significant up-skilling that's coming?

📖 It's refreshing to read a report grounded in such a vast data set. It's worth your time, even though it leans towards Microsoft.

Two Highlights from the Microsoft Build 2023 Keynote

The ongoing developer-focused Microsoft Build conference offers a glimpse into the future. As the event unfolds, I anticipate hearing announcements that eventually will benefit us regular users, reshaping the way we work.

🎙️ Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, kicked-off the conference with several big announcements. As expected, the spotlight was on AI, with two thoughts stuck with me.

🔑 Trust is the cornerstone of AI integration
One demo involved MS Word, supercharged by AI and plugins, editing a legal document. The AI was tasked with making a specific change, which it accomplished by locating the correct paragraph, implementing the change, and then analyzing the enforceability of the law under California jurisdictions.

Would you trust the outcome?

The current workflow is to forward the draft legal document for final approval by (carbon based) lawyers. This is an excellent initial step that promises to reduce costs. Now, imagine a scenario where you trust the system enough to bypass the human element. This could significantly expedite the process and drastically reduce costs!

This thought process can be applied to any situation where AI assists us. However, the stakes are considerably higher with legal documents compared to, say, creating a Spotify playlist.

The question then arises: what would it take for us to trust the system enough to eliminate human verification?

I'm not tempted by a future where my job is to check the output from AI systems.

Let’s build trust! How!?

🗣️ The Evolution of User Interfaces: From Clicks to Conversations
We are witnessing a transition from mouse-click interfaces to natural language interfaces across all applications, including navigating Windows!

Given that text has a low bandwidth, will we soon be conversing with our computers to accomplish tasks?

If so, the ambient noise in office landscapes could shift from 'tak-tak-tak-tak' of keyboards to a of 'bla-bla-bla-bla' as we speak to our computers.

How might this constant verbal interaction with computers reshape office layouts? Could this signal the end of traditional office landscapes?

🥳 Interesting things are happening to the tools we use every day! Looking forward to diving into more presentations from the conference, have you seen anything interesting?

Microsoft Copilot for Bing is open for everyone, how did Microsoft get here?

04 May 2023: Bing went into open preview, just sign into Bing with your Microsoft Account and try the new GPT-4 powered. It's a paradigm shift, it will fundamentally change how you consume information on the internet - you are in for a treat!

🥳 It has made the research process for writing this post much quicker and more enjoyable.

AI is not new for Microsoft, but as the graph shows, the public exposure has been limited until ChatGPT was released at the end of 2022 - then boom, it seems to come from nowhere - did it?

March 30, 2016, Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft makes the direction clear:

“As an industry, we are on the cusp of a new frontier that pairs the power of natural human language with advanced machine intelligence. At Microsoft, we call this Conversations as a Platform, and it builds on and extends the power of the Microsoft Azure, Office 365, and Windows platforms to empower developers everywhere.”

That was 7 years ago!

Back when OpenAI just was founded and the important “Attention is all you need” paper was released by Google researchers. Insiders from Microsoft and OpenAI reveal that the years between 2017 and 2019 were a whirlwind of innovation, experimentation, and collaboration.
GPT-1 was released in 2018, and Microsoft was confident enough to place a $1 billion bet on OpenAI in July of 2019.

📣 In May 2019, Microsoft kicks off a more open and frequent communication on AI by sharing its updated vision for conversational AI:

“Copilot will eventually power conversations across all of Microsoft’s products and services.”

From 2019 and onwards, Microsoft publishes AI news on their website more often, still not extensively on conversational applications:
📌 May 25, 2021: Introduction of the first product features powered by GPT-3, integrating it into Microsoft Power Apps.
📌 October 12, 2022: rollout of DALL-E 2, starting with Designer and Bing Image Creator.

💥 Then boom (GPT-3…) “Conversion as a platform” is becoming a reality with AI-powering more and more apps:

📌 February 3, 2023: Viva Sales gets AI seller experience.
📌 February 7, 2023: Bing and Edge get AI-powers.
📌 March 15, 2023: Dynamics 365 Copilot is introduced.
📌 March 16, 2023: Microsoft 365 Copilot is announced.
📌 March 22, 2023: GitHub Copilot X evolves.
📌 April 20, 2023: Viva AI functionality is Viva Engage, Viva Learning, and Viva Topics.

🌟 With this boost in GPT integrations in the big office productivity tools, I believe that the revolution among “normal users” will start during late Q3 to Q4 of 2023. Exciting times

💡What are your thoughts around this? How will you make sure that your organization realizes the promised boost in productivity? Do you have any story from Microsoft/OpenAI collaboration in the early days (2016-2017) to share?

What AI future do we want to have? Lex, Max what do you say?

The exponentially growing number of AI related posts in my feed are 99% focused on tools and current development. The sentiment is positive. Bullish. Gold rush. I love it ❤️

For another perspective, I highly recommend the Lex Fridman podcast episode with the MIT professor Max Tegmark. In my opinion, Max is often drawn to the edges of problems (typical physicist mindset) and unafraid of big perspectives, listening to him sparks new thoughts in my head.
He has gained a lot of attention lately as one of the authors of the open letter urging for a 6-month pause in AI development, which is the major topic in the interview.

Max talks about our drive for improved efficiency, which has historically created wealth and automated away tedious and dangerous work—great! But now we have a tool that can automate jobs people find meaningful and enjoyable, how do we tackle that?

Should we optimize everything as much as possible? What are we optimizing towards? Efficiency? Our happiness and fulfillment? Or something else? Could we fail and steer towards a unwanted goal?

Do we need to pause and think?
That’s impossible!?

No, Max argues that we have successfully defined global guardrails before, e.g. for cloning of DNA, and it is possible to do again if we want to.

❓What should we do? AI-Pause? or go all-in-AI? What do you think?

🚀 This far, the ChatGPT revolution has been amazing for me. I feel empowered to take on new challenges since I have an assistant on my side. Awesome.

🌟 My dream scenario would be to leverage the AI assistant to remove tedious work, like helping me pay the parking ticket I just got 🤬, and empower me to do new things e.g., creating graphic illustrations, programming Python scripts, and becoming an better writer. However, there are also scenarios that don't sound that appealing, like optimizing away face-to-face interaction with my colleagues. Where are we heading?

I think everything Max says boils down to taking the situation into our own hands, and steering towards the best possible outcome while trying to avoid the unwanted scenarios. He suggests a pause, there might be other ways.

💡To me, the 3-hour-long podcast episode served as a sobering break from the normal flow of information. But now, I'm ready to jump back into AI details, AI tools, and how to AI-optimize my work as a project leader — and sometimes pause, reflect, and adjust the direction.

❓What are your thoughts? Are you afraid of having your job automated away? Or do you feel AI-empowered ?