Will AI Automate Away Your Job?
The time-horizon model explains the future of the technology.
“The key idea where the American worker is concerned is that your job is as automatable as the smallest, fully self-contained task is. For example, call center jobs might be (and are!) very vulnerable to automation, as they consist of a day of 10- to 20-minute or so tasks stacked back-to-back. Ditto for many forms of many types of freelancer services, or paralegals drafting contracts, or journalists rewriting articles. Compare this to a CEO who, even in a day broken up into similar 30-minute activities—a meeting, a decision, a public appearance—each required years of experiential context that a machine can’t yet simply replicate. … This pattern repeats across industries: the shorter the time horizon of your core tasks, the greater your automation risk.”
“The most vulnerable jobs, then, are not those traditionally thought of as threatened by automation—like manufacturing workers or service staff—but the ‘knowledge workers’ once thought to be automation-proof. And most vulnerable of all? The same Silicon Valley engineers and programmers who are building these AI systems. Software engineers whose jobs are based on writing code as discrete, well-documented tasks (often following standardized updates to a central directory) are essentially creating the perfect training data for AI systems to replace them.”
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