AI is the latest advancement in automation. The job losses, the industry shifts, the civil upheaval. None of this is new folks, but that also doesn\u2019t make it fun or exciting to be the one replaced. I\u2019ve been on both sides of this, trust me I feel your pain.<\/p>\n
Humans like to make work easier and more efficient. Are there still people working in some of these industries? Sure but not at the scale of their peak when these jobs would have been a career choice. Let\u2019s just go back say 150 years\u2026<\/p>\n
The steam-powered drill replaced human miners (and yes, John Henry beat it once, and it killed him)<\/p>\n
The gas-powered tractor replaced significant human and animal labor<\/p>\n
The moving assembly line and subsequent robotics replaced the skilled factory worker<\/p>\n
Various waves of agricultural harvesting automations have reduced the use of manual field labor (from cotton to strawberries)<\/p>\n
(Automatic) Computers replaced human \u201cComputers\u201d wiping out an entire career staffed primarily by women<\/p>\n
ATMs have replaced bank tellers<\/p>\n
Automatic telephone switchboards eliminated an entire career path<\/p>\n
Spreadsheets replaced formal Bookkeepers and Accounting Clerks<\/p>\n
Desktop publishing wiped out the prepress industry<\/p>\n
Online hotel and travel reservation booking has replaced the travel agent<\/p>\n
And for the average person on LinkedIn, this is probably more personal than previous waves of automation because it reaches into knowledge work, creative work, and professional identity in ways people didn’t expect. For the last 40 years we told people those careers were safe.<\/p>\n
And unless you\u2019ve been raging against tractors, ATMs, spreadsheets, online booking, desktop publishing, industrial robotics, and every other labor-saving tool with the same energy, then maybe this isn\u2019t really a principled objection. That\u2019s not consolation to you or those who came before you though, is it?<\/p>\n
Do I have an answer? No. But sci-fi writers have been proposing them for decades: universal basic income, radical restructuring of how we think about work and value, decoupling survival from employment. The ideas aren’t new. We just refuse to take them seriously until the crisis is personal. And even then, we’d rather fight about whether the automation is fair than talk about what comes after it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
AI is the latest advancement in automation. The job losses, the industry shifts, the civil upheaval. None of this is new folks, but that also doesn\u2019t make it fun or exciting to be the one replaced. I\u2019ve been on both sides of this, trust me I feel your pain. Humans like to make work easier […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[195],"tags":[196,225,227,237,66],"class_list":["post-949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linkedin","tag-ai","tag-automation","tag-career","tag-content-strategy","tag-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kitchencloset.com\/home\/bryan\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kitchencloset.com\/home\/bryan\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kitchencloset.com\/home\/bryan\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kitchencloset.com\/home\/bryan\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kitchencloset.com\/home\/bryan\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=949"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kitchencloset.com\/home\/bryan\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/949\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":988,"href":"https:\/\/www.kitchencloset.com\/home\/bryan\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/949\/revisions\/988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kitchencloset.com\/home\/bryan\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kitchencloset.com\/home\/bryan\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kitchencloset.com\/home\/bryan\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}