The great leveling
It's easy to get drawn into spiralling discussions about what AI’s killing. Exhibit A: the Guardian piece that inspired this article: ‘Will AI wipe out the first rung of the career ladder?;.
Provocative indeed.
“Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, told Axios last week that he believes that AI could cut half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and send overall unemployment rocketing to 20% within the next five years.”
No doubt, this prediction is already coming true in some working categories. The Royals’ own strategy department is a prime example, where the need for a junior planner less apparent. Not because we did not love those people, but because those tasks can, and have, been made simpler and easier with A.I.
Accepting that some tasks can be done by a tool is, in a way, lazy or complacent and sort of misses the point, doesn’t it? Sure, we can probably keep getting the work done, but at what cost? Where we gain in terms of expedience, we lose in terms of greater diversity of lived experience, of human perspective. Not to mention future talent.
That’s why talking about the rung of a ladder is the wrong question. In an AI-powered world, the ladder itself becomes redundant. The experience accumulated over decades is now democratised. Access to the collective knowledge of any documented field of work is open to anyone.
And let’s face it, who’s going to be better at using these tools ultimately? Young people fresh out of school who’ve grown up with them or industry veterans forced to adapt later in life? The real battle will be who can use them best, who can leverage their taste, discernment to create better outputs.
But maybe this isn’t just a loss. Maybe it’s a gain where we can start to rethink linear, and what might be broken, hierarchies and structures in favour of new models.
The great leveling will bring not just the levelling of roles but the levelling of access. One of voices, of who gets to enter, and how we ultimately judge the value of people and their tools they create.
