Will AI Take Your Job? Part 1: The End of History Illusion
This week, Cognition AI released a demo for a new product called Devin. And the AI Twitterverse was freaking out (as these demos seem to do…
This week, Cognition AI released a demo for a new product called Devin. And the AI Twitterverse was freaking out (as these demos seem to do on a near-weekly basis). Devin is an AI that works as an autonomous agent building software. A year ago, I wrote of the promise of AutoGPTs- agents that can do any task told and do it well. They never quite transpired, but this seems closer. Cognition AI claims it can complete 14% of tasks without human intervention. While it may not sound impressive, remember that this means it builds a webpage or service 1/7 of the time with ZERO human intervention. And as folks in AI circles like to say, “This is the worst that AI will ever get.”
So Software Engineers are freaking out after seeing this. But, of course, they’re not the only ones asking if AI will take their jobs.
I recently had a conversation with someone who is a video editor. He saw OpenAI’s Sora demo and similarly freaked out. If AI can create a video with cuts, pans, and smooth edits, what purpose does an editor serve in that future?
The honest answer is very little. If an AI can do the things you do in your job faster, better, and cheaper, then I don’t see how your job will exist.
But, luckily for all of us, jobs change.
Let’s stay in the world of video editing. How did we edit movies? We used to cut tape.
Back in the olden days, an editor had the original film stock and would take a razor blade, cut the pieces of the film they wanted, and then glue them together with adhesive tape or cement. When I was a young kid, back in the less-olden days, I would hook up my 8MM camera to a VCR and edit back and forth between the machines. It was painful, but it was all we had.
Then, in the late 1990s/2000s, came the advent of non-linear editing. You digitize the video and audio, upload them to a computer, and drag and drop them.
Video editing is so much better now. So even when a film creator like Christopher Nolan uses practical effects instead of CGI to create an atomic explosion, his team still edits digitally. As do the other 33,000 video editors in the United States.
<Note- I’m pretty sure that’s not how Nolan and the crew did the explosion, but I appreciated the inventiveness of Midjourney here>
So what of these 33,000 jobs? Do they all disappear once the AI tools are up to the task? It is hard for us to fathom how our jobs will change. What will this job be like in ten years? Right? This is all related to “The End of History Illusion.”
The End of History Illusion is a cognitive bias discovered by Dan Gilbert (the Harvard psychologist who also had a run as a Prudential spokesperson), where individuals believe that they have experienced significant personal growth and change up to the current point in their lives. But they vastly underestimate how much they will continue to grow and change in the future.
Gilbert and his team crafted an example of the End of History Illusion in their original paper. Think about these questions yourself. Who is your favorite singer/artist today? How much would you pay to see them in concert in 10 years? Do you have a number in mind?
Now, think back ten years. Who was your favorite singer in 2014? For most people, it is different. How much would you pay to see your formerly favorite singer play a concert today?
Pharrell Williams topped the Billboard charts in 2014. According to Gilbert, you’re willing to pay a lot less to see him today than you’re willing to pay to see Taylor Swift in 2034. We say we’ll pay much more to see our favorite artist today in the future than we will pay to see our favorite artist from the past today. And this was consistent across age ranges. In reality, our 2034 self would not want to see Taylor Swift as much as our 2024 self thinks we will want to.
We tend to think that who we are today is who we will always be. We don’t see how our future self will be different, let alone better. But we do see how we are different from our past. Humans perpetuate this illusion throughout our lives. We struggle to see how we will grow and improve in the future, but we always do.
If you are a video editor today, it is hard to see how your job will change in the future. But it is easy to see how it has evolved from the past. In a few years, video editors will do infinitely more than move-around clips to get the best take and the tightest edit. They will digitally redub an actor’s voice instead of having the actor come in again to record an ADR. They will switch from a close-up to an overhead shot of an actor even though there was no camera overhead to capture that video. AI will enable an editor to do these things and much more. Their job will be so much more than it is today.
If you’re a software engineer, should you worry about Devin? If your job remains what it is today: taking requirements, coding, compiling, and debugging, then yes. But with AI, your job too will be much more. You can spend more time on system design, problem-solving, and enhancing user experiences.
As AI advances, it’s natural to feel uncertain about the future of our jobs. AI will change our jobs. However, the End of History Illusion reminds us that change will happen, and we will underestimate our ability to adapt.
By staying informed and proactive, we can harness AI tools to enhance our work and unlock new possibilities. Most of AI’s value will come not from replacing humans but from enhancing our capabilities.
Let me know what you think, and come back again next week for Part 2 of “Will AI Take Your Job?”