The Future of Work in 2023

ChatGPT and GPT-4 are just the beginning.

Hello Everyone,

“Despite all the hype and excitement, people still aren’t grokking the full impact of the coming wave of ai. within the next ten years, most ‘cognitive manual labor’ is going to be carried out by ai systems.

Call centers, invoicing, payroll, paralegals, scheduling, bookkeeping, back office admin, and so on… these are the first. planning and more complex sequences of actions will comes shortly after. - (Tweet) Mustafa Suleyman, CEO Inflection AI.

We’ve been complacent pushing off the automation of jobs at scale to some far off sci-fi future that while inevitable, felt realistically, dozens to hundreds of years in the future. But what if, that is not entirely accurate? Many A.I. researchers, economists and future analysts believe that LLMs are a General Purpose Technology, that flips this paradigm of automation exponentially.

Amid false claims of what GPT-4 can do, and speculations about how employees are using A.I. in their job, it’s a confusing nascent period of LLMs and A.I. as a general purpose technology, if it is actually that at all.

I don’t believe you can compare with what LLMs, robotics and AI assistants and other A.I. becomes at scale with historical precedents (in recent human history) or previous waves of automation. If LLMs are a general purpose technology, they impact most if not all tasks in most if not all jobs across industries more or less simultaneously, in a very short time span, say 25 years. That period of rapid disruption might be upon us circa 2030 to 2055.

That is, the sum total of A.I. in the 21st century is a wave of automation fundamentally unlike any other. You can’t compare it with other GPTs or epochs of human history and automation, because it is at a whole different scale. How it evolves is an unknown, a black box, not something easily understand in its nascent years.

• Read: What they Don't tell you about A.I. Jobs Disruption?

• Read: GPTs are GPTs: An early look at the labor market impact potential of large language models

• Read: World Economic Forum Report, Warnings from Microsoft and Hinton, Future of Jobs Report.

• Read: Will Larger LLMs and ChatGPT Really Disrupt our Jobs?

• Read: Hippocratic A.I. is First Safety Focused LLM for Healthcare

• Read: Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models

A new report from McKinsey announced in mid June, 2023 is forecasting that generative AI could add the equivalent of up to $4.4 trillion annually to the global economy, and has the potential to automate 60% to 70% of the work that consumes employees' time today.

So between GoldmanSachs (Report, 20 pages), OpenAI researcehrs, McKinsey and others, a new projected picture is starting to take shape for the years ahead.

• Download the Future of Jobs report by the WEF too if you are interested. The puzzle picture that emerges is a very different world that you could call the first phase of the Machine Economy.