> You’d need to be high enough in the org chart; far enough up the pyramid; advanced enough along the career ladder.
> To be an AI optimist, I’m guessing you must not be worried about where your next job might come from, or whether you can even find one. The current dire state of the job market, I have to assume, doesn’t scare you. You must feel secure.
So I think even these people should not feel secure.
The perceived value of expertise is decreased by AI which routinely claims to have PhD level mastery of a lot of material. I think even for people with deep experience, in the current job market, many firms are reluctant to hire or pay in a way that's commensurate with that expertise.
If you're a leader whose clout in an organization is partly tied to how many people are under you in an org-chart (it's dumb but we have all seen it), maybe that will begin to shrink quarter after quarter.
Unless you can make it genuinely obvious that a junior or mid-tier person could not write a prompt which cause a model to spew the knowledge or insight that you have won through years or decades of work, your job may become vulnerable.
I think the class divide that is most relevant is more literal and old-school:
- Do you _own_ enough of businesses that that's how you get most of your income? If so, maybe there's a way that AI will either cause your labor costs decrease, or your productivity per worker increases, and either way you're probably happy.
- Can you invest specifically in the firms that are actively building AI, or applications thereof?
We're back to owners vs workers, with the added dynamic that if AI lets you partially replace labor with capital, then owners of course take a bigger share of value created going forward.