It’s Wednesday, so that means it’s time to continue my posting about AI and machine learning inserting itself, like Clippy on nanobot steroids, into the economy, I’ve already covered one of the big issues people have discovered by being “disruption first” and “figuring out what we’re disrupting” second. I link to a lot of videos and such in my early May post in that regard.
For the TL;DR crowd, too much AI implementation is not respecting the reality that any given job is made up of a multitude of tasks, not all of which are easily automated. I’ve also posted more recently about the perspective that not only are there some skills that AI is unlikely to replace anytime soon, but those pesky liberal arts folks might be well suited for those roles.
And there’s some jobs that, due to the experience needed we know can’t be automated yet… and should they be? (All the more important since the current crop of LLMs may have a definite limit before hallucinating to an unreasonable degree).
During the Pandemic, we all had an opportunity to examine who the true essential workers are and while a lot of different jobs came up as critical as an HVAC tech in July, I remember doctors and teachers coming up consistently: especially doctors and related medical staff. Y’know, that whole Pandemic thing. But anyone with kids in school at that point knows how much teachers were navigating the insanity.
So where we are, not 10 years later and AI is coming to shake up everything… and we have a problem with our number of doctors and teachers: they’re aren’t enough. And I’m not saying AI is the cause, but in amongst this happiest of timelines, this video asks:
- Why are essential workers disappearing in the first place?
- Why can’t migration continue to be the solution for this issue?
- What happens if this shortage becomes permanent?
Spoiler: demographics and public investment get into the mix which, to my mind, should also get into discussions about what AI is doing and how it should ideally affect the economy.