Latest / Black Box Theory Podcast / BBT #09 Snippet | AI Isn't Coming for Your Job — It's Coming for Your Salary
Transcript
- Thomas: But I guess another area where you should be informed, ⁓ because this is also super heavily ⁓ mixed into voting and where money comes from and all this sort of ⁓ OpenAI super app and the AI job paradox. So is building an app that replaces browser. your code editor, and possibly your job. ⁓ While Meta is reportedly cutting 20 % of its workforce to fund $135 billion in AI spending message, the same technology is creating and destroying jobs simultaneously. malcolm: Nice, more A.I. slop headlines, man. Just what I wanted to hear, bro. And it's like, I'm sorry to people that listen to this, they're like, bruh, homies are... Thomas: You life. malcolm: everything is AI. There is no, you're not going to go a day without hearing about AI anymore unless every data center on the planet just vanishes. Those days are gone, brother. So you do need to understand, and this isn't even about... I hope you don't think that this is only a tech thing now. This is white collar work everywhere, and it's going to be blue collar work in some time as well too. It's not a... We're not here sitting here trying to discuss... who's gonna get displaced first, hopefully it's no one. In an ideal world, we would be using AI to supplement workers instead of trying to use it as a lever to kind of cut costs and to cut people. ⁓ I think that if people were really worried about productivity gains and efficiency gains, more money would be going towards actually training people to how to leverage these tools and how to leverage these ⁓ kind of like. automated systems to handle more mundane tasks and allow the humans to focus on more creatively demanding work, work that requires more of human touch and understanding, instead of just using AIs, all right, bet, you can go now. And that should tell you a lot about the state of tech executives now and what their priorities are. And you should also understand that these corporations, they view you as now. corporations just view you as more money they can put towards your compute capex spending. And that's a really unfortunate way to kind of think about it. This is across tech everywhere. This isn't even just hyperscalers. This is across consulting. This is across healthcare. This is across federal government. This is everywhere, bro. Like, this isn't just software engineers anymore. It's everyone, right? So, like I said, like we've kind of been reiterating this entire episode. It's one thing to be acutely aware of. what's going on in the world, saying a breast of news and what's kind of coming out. But it's also just as important to continuously improve and refine your skills. Now, this is through certifications, through watching different courses. Like I say, everything else, you do not have to be an AI demigod. But you should understand how AI works. You should understand its capabilities. You should understand how tokenization works. You should try to get some type of certification so that you can demonstrate. Thomas: do. malcolm: fundamental capabilities to understand AI and how it can actually be implemented into workflows. How it can be used to automate things. these, like I said, it sounds like a hassle, but when stuff like this comes out, you're a fool if you think you're just going to sit back, lean back in your chair, put your arms up. Yeah, bro. They're never going to lay me off. My brother, you're next, right? Like, so that you're capable of learning these skills. I'm not saying that you have to... Thomas: you malcolm: use like and understand like understand how to actually implement it because the difference between knowing what AI is but how do you use it in your own workflows? How do you speed up and create more productivity games for yourself and for your team? That's where it kind of matters right like sitting back and just looking at AI looking at the headlines or you just look like a sheep grazing grass before it's getting ready to get freaking sheathed and slaughtered bro like learn something teach yourself a new skill bro like These headlines as crazy as they sound, all these different workforce reductions, compute, these of billions of dollars going towards compute capacity and data center infrastructure, this should just be nothing but motivation and it's like an alert in your head going off like, A, I need to lock in. Like, I need to get, like, I need to get with the program. Like, I need to be like, I need to learn this stuff. I need to learn, teach myself a new skill. I need to like understand like which way the market is heading because this is such a rapidly expanding. sector and technology, by the time you learn one cert, it's going to be a whole nother certain path that you have to expand now. You're going to make your job a lot harder, and you're going to make your learning path a lot harder if you continue to push it back and push it back and push it back. Because when you're starting at ground zero, when we're three or four years into the AI race, you're going to be so behind as compared to someone who's been trying to at least, at best they can, constantly keep up with the way it's expanding and the way these new technologies are coming up. The way that Claude and Anthropic and OpenAI are consistently shipping out new features and products, a lot of the time, cowork comes out, there's a codex, and there's gonna be codex V2, codex V3, and there's gonna be a new product out that you haven't even heard of that can do what the last two products can do 10 times better. like I said, so it's like, the more you wait, the harder it's gonna be to catch up, bro. And that's just what it is.