Note: This was originally posted on the Technology & Philosophy Substack.
Generative AI is taking over much of the drudgery of tech & IT work. It writes boring code, creates presentations, writes texts that no one reads anyway but have to be there, and does many other similar drudgery tasks.
It’s similar to how mechanization and industrialization revolutionized production in the 19th century. Over time nails, hammers, clothing, and much else that humans & companies needed and wanted for everyday life could be produced with much less effort, cost and manual labor. Britain pioneered many of the production techniques in the 1780s, which then spread across the United States and the rest of Europe throughout the 19th century. The industrial revolution truly transformed how goods were produced, removing manual and artisinal jobs from the equation for thousands of types of common products.
Generative AI is doing the same thing for information technology. Tech workers are doing less and less of the drudgery tasks of their jobs, and relying on generative AI for text, media, code & other assets, which previously were created manually.
Drudgery redefined
So is the impact of Generative AI truly comparable with the impact of the industrial revolution? In a word, yes. Similarly to how manual labor was previously needed to produce common products such as nails and hammers, manual effort was needed until recently for informational products such as descriptive text, images, media, presentations & code. These types of products are not the interesting, creative assets that we generally notice & admire, but rather the generic, background data that fills in the picture of most modern products & business life. Think of product instructional videos, pictures, text & other materials that are part of product releases - not the key parts, but the background parts that have to be there for legal and consumer informational reasons.
So yes, most if not all of this type of content will be generated by AI in the future. AI agents will synchronize with other agents on what needs to be done, will do it, and let the work be checked by further agents. Humans will be in the loop at a high level, monitoring the progress and steps for general errors or issues to be corrected in the various “agent builder” tools. And that’s it, that’s the end for millions of media & programming jobs in modern society. Content service factories of models will crank out assets at an automated pace on-demand, with very little human effort needed, similarly to the manufacturing of mass-produced products and product-parts in great batches of mechanized creation.
The path forward
What does this mean for workers in the future? Today, most common physical goods are mass produced through mechanized factories, however these factories still need skilled workers to create and design the machinery, monitor the progress and catch errors & fix problems, and generally keep the automation aligned with overall targets & output demands.
Similarly in the tech world, much of the digital goods that are generated will also be produced by automated agents who can build, assemble, test and release the products with minimal supervision & guidance. However skilled trainers, owners and operators are and will be needed to manage the pipelines, do quality controls, and take care of aligning needs & outcomes that the agents cannot judge by themselves.
The types of workers needed will change. I predict that people-interfacing jobs will become more important, to counter the automation of content production. Creativity will become even more noticeable & desirable to counter the generic content produced by AI agents. We as humans will regroup and have time to focus on what brings us joy and brings more value to life & society, which typically is not creating generic slide presentations or writing boring product copy. Creativity, art, philosophy, theorizing on the meaning & direction of humanity, dreaming of how we can be happier and more productive in our human lives will be more possible in a world where we are freed from the most boring & reductive parts of our jobs. New types of jobs will sprout up, more creative, more human, more individual compared to corporate drudgery of the past.
That is the most positive vision of an outcome. A more pessimistic take is that we will be even more dumbed-down by the torrent of generated AI content, and we will forget how to create for ourselves, similarly to how we have forgotten how to read and navigate directions with an atlas because of our reliance on GPS navigation apps.
This may be true for some people, but we should work to make sure that we use this opportunity to help everyone up their information and content game. That through education & experience people grow & learn to value truly creative & thought-provoking content, and not to be seduced by the cheap, disposable, non-creative content produced by rote AI algorithms. Yes, the AI-created content will flood our media & digital worlds, and yes, it will threaten to overload our senses and our little minds with quantity over quality, with mass over intelligence. But we can counter it. We can connect more with people, with real content, original and thought-provoking ideas, new & truly imaginative creations that is beyond what AI can fathom, since it is trained only on existing data. Then AI will learn from that, start producing stuff like it, and we will need to up our game again, and again. AI will help motivate and push us to be better, to dream for more understanding and deep insights, and not settle for cheap copies of past hits. It will revolutionize our minds and our development, if we can learn to deal with it, to use it, to harness it to help us grow as humans who are uniquely great at creating things that no human or algorithm has previously produced. That is the power and potential of human creativity, which AI can help us supercharge and evolve ever forward to new creative realms of discovery & understanding.
Conclusion
So yes, AI is the industrial revolution of the tech world. Yes, it will make millions of jobs redundant, and replace a lot of digital human drudgery with automated results. And yes, we can capitalize and utilize this chance to advance our minds & our societies to new creative heights. AI can be the motivation to help us grow past our current limitations, and not settle for copies of copies of recycled content to fill our time, but rather to always strive to create new original ideas & inspired concepts, again and again, ever onward. AI is the recycling center of digital data - like plastic recycling, it lets new be created from old, again and again, but never steps beyond that (its algorithms compress and recycle, nothing more). We humans also recycle ideas, but then we bring inspiration & ingenuity into the mix, occasionally creating genuinely new conceptions that move minds forward. So for that reason let’s leverage and utilize AI like any useful tool. But don’t overstate its capabilities - it is and will be the industrial recycling center for digital content, and while useful, it’s not where the real music is played.