Genevieve (Scout CMO) addressing the room packed with investors and bankers. With Heath Terry of Goldman Sachs on the left and the CEO of Databricks in the center.
Heath: There has been healthy debate around the effect AI may have on the labor market; namely the elimination/creation of job roles. Where do you stand in this debate?
McKinsey concludes that for people earning over $200K, 31% of their time is spent collecting and processing data, and that is ripe for automation.
On one hand, we have seen this story before. 200 years ago, 90% of Americans worked in farming. Today, it is 2% and we feed more than just America. Technology progress created many new jobs that did not exist in 1800 or 1900.
So, we can look at today, and wring our hands that 20% of people today that have a job drive for a living. And we can see the inevitability of that also dropping below 2% with autonomous vehicles. But it’s a question of timing and the pace of change. Change will come much more quickly this time around.
Many of the new jobs of late are at the “edge of automation” (think uber drivers and Amazon warehouse workers). They are jobs that just beg to be replaced by technology, They are surrounded by automation (smart phone apps for Uber, robots for Amazon), and that is their primary interface. If they are replaced with an AI, there is no disruption to the business model – it just runs better.
Leave a Reply