How AI Will Push Knowledge Work Into The Gig Economy

"Just get a college degree and you'll be all set!", said every baby boomer ever. Yeah, right. This is not the seventies. Generative AI has just gone mainstream: it can create summaries, meeting notes, PowerPoint presentations, charts, and whatnot. It's going after the so-called college-necessary white-collar work fast.

In the next few years, knowledge workers will confront a new reality: the gig economy. We will see a new category of freelancers emerge out of the ruins of bureaucracies. The question is: are you ready? Let me explain how I expect the shift to unravel:

• How generative AI will shake up knowledge work
• How the Great Recession can inform us about the inevitable recovery
• Why the new jobs AI will create are better suited for independent contractors
• How to prepare

Generative AI is the First Risk to White-Collar Work to Ever Happen

Think about all the computer automation that happened since the 1970s: nearly all of them removed what researchers call "routine tasks" in jobs that required low education levels. The first wave of computer automation did affect "knowledge"-like work such as travel agents and bank tellers, but the effects were more profound in domains such as car manufacturing where industrial robots took over parts of the assembly line.

Experts argue that the first wave of computers raised the demand for high-education jobs such as programmers, managers, and consultants, who used the data from the computers to deliver new types of value altogether.

On the other hand, less educated knowledge workers, according to the paper, joined food services. The computers did exclude them from the higher-paying "steady office job" strata. The effects were worse on older workers.

What's striking in this new wave of automation is precisely that the programmer, manager, and consultant are no longer safe. Computers can act on the data by themselves!  Suddenly, accountants, journalists, paralegals, customer service agents, middle managers, receptionists, and even marketers face the very real prospect of going the bank teller way: food services.

This is like the Taxi driver seeing Uber rise in 2009. Being about to get disrupted sucks. The last financial crisis paints an even grimmer picture.

After the 2008 Recession, Manufacturing Jobs Went to the Gig Economy

We have a recent marker of how the disruption of the 2008 economic meltdown changed work as we knew it. Experts point out how a whole generation delayed having children, owning homes and, more importantly, got into contracting jobs. "Alternative work" became the trend or, as the formula has it, temporary work became a permanent status.  

"These jobs are not coming back", Steve Jobs famously said to Barack Obama when confronted on the iPhones factories moving to China.    

The recovery data shows how new workers were forced to move to urban areas to get by with gig work. In a nutshell: the unionized factory worker who built appliances in southern Michigan suddenly had to be a Uber driver to make ends meet.

Am I being alarmist? My friends would say I'm more of a LARPist, but I digress. The economy keeps adding jobs despite record inflation, to the dismay of economists. Well, the journeyman-turned-gig-worker still counts as being employed regardless of the conditions.

Context differs between the 2008 financial crisis and the current AI revolution. Yet I see both events as a dramatic shift in employment: jobs number will stay steady, or even grow, but there will be a storm from the inside. My argument here is the following: AI will morph many white-collar jobs into independent contract work. Instead of accountants, you'll have accounting automation consultants. A generation of "AI systems orchestrators" will thrive: digital assistant coaches, automated systems advisors, model trainers, model reviewers, and expert systems operations specialists...

Not everything is negative, of course, because...

The AI Economy Will Bring Unexpected Needs and Jobs

In his latest essay, Scott Galloway looks at historic technological breakthroughs and concludes that we are too fixated on the short-term disruptions against sectors rendered irrelevant overnight, and not enough on the jobs we never knew could exist:

We’re fixated on how many horses will be out of a job. Harder to imagine, however, is how many jobs the car will create [...]. It’s hard to envision radios, turn-signal lights, motion sensors, and heated seats. Let alone NASCAR, The Italian Job, and the drive-through window.

This piece from The Atlantic imagines some of them with examples from prompt marketplaces, MidJourney freelancers on Fiverr or businesses that "wrap" OpenAI's GPT around specific expertise. These are first-degree skills. Prompting will become easier over time, I don't necessarily see it in the same light.

Let's imagine some of them:

• A quality assurance specialist who controls accounting calculations of hundreds of AI systems
• A commercial operations specialist who monitors self-optimizing pricing of goods in a shopping center based on attendance, margins, and inventory
• AI reliability specialists who train models that spot biases in other AI systems
• Fashion designers who create outfits based on simple commands
• Organizers of real and online international AI-based multimedia competitions, interactive challenges, conventions
• Self-programmed videogames operators
• Owners of "micro-streaming" services based on extremely specific hobbies
• Wordle speedrunners

OK, that last one was wishful thinking. Nevertheless, the net result will be more artists, creations and communities around them. Do we really want coal miners when these same people can make a living showing videos of themselves building self-driving boxcars with 3D-printed material and selling them on Etsy? Or dog stylists?

Everything about these predictions will be wrong (except the fashion one, I want to create my own pyjamas with AI). What's not wrong is thinking outside the box. There was no such thing as a security analyst when I was a kid! My kid's jobs of the future probably don't exist right now.

The only constant is change.

We Need a Psychologically-Safe Transition

Stopping technology misses the point entirely. As Galloway points out, Luddites who smashed textile machines to save weavers' jobs wasted their energy. Fighting technological progress is like trying to contain the wind. As Daniel Jeffries argues: let's speed up AI! Expose it so we can find its flaws in the open! Stop worrying over every negative outcome and let it go.

One silver lining I see is that white-collar people who are about to get disrupted have an advantage over bank tellers of the 1980s. In aggregate, they probably have better digital literacy. The hill to climb is less steep.

What we collectively need is to soften the transition. Better social programs, easier re-education, and safety nets. Andrew Yang's provocative "Universal Basic Income" might be economically or culturally infeasible, but one's got to admire the capacity to identify a problem and bring solutions to the table.  

Maybe AI could help us build such programs.

Let's Build Our Own Future Together

I know what gig work is. I got my first steady job at 31. I spent my twenties living off scholarships and temporary government contracts. I had to pivot into computer sciences to get a regular paycheck.

Just know that what I have been describing is not wishful thinking. Hustling for work is stressful, especially with children to feed. I’m looking at trends here to build a mindset for the future.

I remain convinced by the following hypotheses:

• Our people skills will matter more than ever before
• Premium content will pass the reverse Turing test, will feel more authentic and grounded in human experience
• Machines will not internalize your organization's values and solve difficult tradeoffs

Everything else is paperwork.

If you have felt that entrepreneurial itch for a while, rest assured the new era will offer plenty of opportunities, especially when you are a pioneer in your field. The gig economy is filled with feel-good stories of real people becoming successful - many due to the internet. I can't shut up about the creator economy for good reason. When I was a teenager playing in rock bands, the only hope of diffusion was getting a label to sign us. No artist in their right mind wants to go back to this gatekeeper model.

And no college degree is mandatory to be set.

Latest In Tech

Privacy and Cybersecurity

• Reddit Hacked. The threat actors cloned Reddit's intranet, sent phishing e-mails, and defeated two-factor authentication (2FA). As a cybersecurity professional, these hacks terrorize me. Widespread use of 2FA is probably less than 5 years old in the field. Now we have to up the ante. More layers of protection mean more friction and less buy-in.  Story
• Iran-backed threat actors Neptunium hacked cartoonist Charlie Hebdo. The satire magazine ran a cartoon contest to ridicule the Iranian Supreme Leader in December. 200,000 subscribers' personal information was stolen, which Authorities believe will be used to harass these people. This is a stark reminder of how dangerous cybercrime can be. I need a drink.  Story

Business of Tech

• Layoffs in tech continue: GitHub lays off 10% and goes fully remote, Zoom removes 15% of its workforce, and Twilio cuts 17%. The Covid hangover cannot explain everything. By this point, I believe many companies are just following the parade. If one sheep leaps over the ditch, all the rest will follow. Losing your livelihood because executives want to please shareholders sucks, no doubt. The good news is everywhere else is hiring.

Artificial Intelligence

• Chinese authorities spread propaganda on social media using deepfake news anchors. Specialists call the phenomenon "spamouflage" campaigns. Spammers used the commercial tool Synthesia to generate misinformation. Generative AI will absolutely bring the downside of making the bad guys more productive as well. Story
• DJ David Guetta played an Eminem deepfake with ChatGPT lyrics in a concert. I'm biased. David Guetta's TikTok is a guilty pleasure of mine. When confronted about his song, Guetta claimed "the future of music is AI". I'm not smart enough to understand this legal blog on deepfakes copyright issues, but the TL;DR seems to be that this is 100% legal. I'm actually very optimistic about this. TikTok is full of these memes of memes of memes. This is how people enjoy experiencing content nowadays! As a PhD in literary art, I'm just amazed at our capacity to absorb these layers of semiotic complexity. The Song
• AI art studio wins photo contest. I wrote back in September about the controversy of an AI winning a digital pictures contest. This time, the artists made the picture appear to come from a genuine photograph. They got a $100 gift card as a prize. Story

Your ChatGPT dose for the week

• ChatGPT will soon be integrated into Word, PowerPoint and Excel.
• New Bing and Edge will also be powered by ChatGPT-like technology.
• A student discovered how to unlock new Bing's developer mode and inject commands via prompts.
• ChatGPT is the product that reached 100 million users the fastest.
• Nvidia CEO claims ChatGPT gave this generation its iPhone moment.

I agree with the "iPhone sentiment". ChatGPT is problematic. It's also probably not the best model that will become the digital assistant of the future. But OpenAI put an amazing piece of technology into our hands which we all experienced in such a simple, familiar form - a chatbot - and magic happened. We got it.

Question of the Week

What are your thoughts on self-employment?