198 - Future of Work

I've been thinking lately about the changing role that humans can play in our hyper-complex global systems once the technology that actually solves hyper-complexity better than humans is deployed.

While most currently popular AI is trivial, misused, and abused, and when it does function primarily automates simple but time-consuming or costly tasks, fundamentally different technology built specifically to handle hyper-complexity has been demonstrated and could be deployed in as little as a year.

Humans chronically ask variations on the question "Where is my place in the world? In my workplace? In my community?", because it is a strong and deep emotional need, the sense of belonging, community, and purpose. The question is fairly certain to continue being asked, but which specific variations are asked will change.

Hyper-complexity today offers humans many flaming hoops to jump through to get almost anything done, and those flaming hoops often have little or nothing to do with the destination or skills required for it. Humanity has a "Minimum Viable Society" today, just barely stumbling through those flaming hoops without burning everything down. So, what happens when the flaming hoops are instead resolved by systems that handle hyper-complexity far better than humans?

Such systems could pave roads through the swamps of bureaucratic sludge, but people would still have to travel those roads. This could instead be driven by some combination of what skills people have and are willing to invest in developing, as well as what they want to do, and what they find meaningful and rewarding in life.

Humans don't have to handle much complexity, let alone hyper-complexity, in many of the roles they may play well in society. Most people don't need to have a deep understanding of AI, but many headaches may be avoided when they at least accept that they don't have that understanding of domains.

For example, a colleague recently spoke with someone exceedingly naïve claiming that our technology was "...just built on LLMs", which was functionally equivalent to claiming that "...electricity was just built on toaster technology", since electricity preceded the toaster, and was only one of the countless uses for it, much as our technology preceded LLMs, and could use pretty much any AI or other internet-connected resource as tools. Don't be that guy.

Society has a constant and dynamically shifting flow of opportunities that need people to fill them, and if the hyper-complexity of navigating those currents may be handled by our technology rather than left on the individual's shoulders, a great deal more of those opportunities may be fulfilled.

That is a key difference I see in the future of work, less squandered opportunities, and greater personal agency.