> In the longer term, you must live with, for want of a better term, a loss of innocence. Once you’ve gone through the Bad Thing, you understand deep in your bones that Bad Things can and not infrequently do happen.
A big difference is that in youth, one has little "social capital", little of the expected net present value of the rest of your life is connected to the particular industry, job, and contacts that you have. As you get older, your pay generally goes up, but more and more of it hinges on all sorts of specific relationships. And smaller and smaller changes start to threaten a larger fraction of that.
Change really is the only constant in life. Great tips at the end - if you can't beat em', join em'! (and in case you're wondering whether I wrote this message myself or subbed it out to A1, it was me - the clichés are all mine!)
Part of the trouble is that economic transitions are starting to happen on scales shorter than one's working lifetime. It's not just that the son must get a different job than the father, but the father much change industries repeatedly.
"Third, the same forces that attacked blue collar wages and employment in the last generation are now being felt by professionals; lawyers, journalists and professors now share some of the stress steelworkers have known for decades, and they don't like it, and are very good at squealing." -- Walter Russell Mead
"One of the toughest morals of the globalization of industry is that only the best companies can expect to survive -- and then, generally, on shorter rations. The moral is applicable to an uncomfortably large number of [...] industries, including [automobiles,] banking, agriculture and aerospace. The problem generally is going to be to get rid of the corpses -- not to continue to resurrect them." -- David Warsh
I work a lot with AI and the law. The biggest question I get from attorneys is, obviously, whether they’re going to have a job next year. The answer is: definitely, but you need to learn to use AI. AI isn’t anywhere near robot-lawyers, but in five years being a lawyer who refuses to use AI is going to be like being a mathematician who insists on using an abacus.
Im talking out of my ass, but I do get the feeling that it might be similar in your industry. It’s not like “the law” writ large isn’t going to shed jobs because of AI, but right now those are the law-adjacent jobs that went offshore ages ago. I’d be more worried if I lived in India. All those data entry armies are fucked.
People aren’t going to need writers to produce really simple copy or designers for basic logos as much, but most of the work is going to be for people who wouldn’t have paid for it anyway. A cool AI picture in your Substack; some language for your website. That’s not nothing, but “automated playwright” it isn’t.
Musicians survived just fine through the phonograph, the radio, electric keyboards. I expect this will end much the same. The job will change but the demand won’t. I hope.
All good points my learned friend - I actually wrote quite a few stories back in the day about 'legaltech' entrepreneurs who were offering cut-price service by either automating or outsourcing (usually to the Philippines, in the case of Australian firms) as much as possible. I hope your hopes are realised re job change rather than job destruction.
You're right, but not quite right. Generally, these transitions don't reduce the *amount produced* but they dramatically reduce the *number of producers*. Indeed, in most cases, the decline in the price of the product increases the amount consumed.
Consider farming: A couple of hundred years ago, maybe 90% of Americans were farmers. A hundred years ago, probably 50% still were. It's down to about 2% now, and everybody is a lot fatter than they were before. But a lot of people have moved out of the farming business. Music has been like that, it used to be that bars and cafes had bands that played in the evening, now they use recorded music. What's really been lost is the half-decently-paid lower tier of music; if you aren't good enough to play in a symphony, you probably can't get paid to play music at all.
> In the longer term, you must live with, for want of a better term, a loss of innocence. Once you’ve gone through the Bad Thing, you understand deep in your bones that Bad Things can and not infrequently do happen.
A big difference is that in youth, one has little "social capital", little of the expected net present value of the rest of your life is connected to the particular industry, job, and contacts that you have. As you get older, your pay generally goes up, but more and more of it hinges on all sorts of specific relationships. And smaller and smaller changes start to threaten a larger fraction of that.
Change really is the only constant in life. Great tips at the end - if you can't beat em', join em'! (and in case you're wondering whether I wrote this message myself or subbed it out to A1, it was me - the clichés are all mine!)
I would expect nothing less from a now-prominent member of Australia's literati!
Part of the trouble is that economic transitions are starting to happen on scales shorter than one's working lifetime. It's not just that the son must get a different job than the father, but the father much change industries repeatedly.
"Third, the same forces that attacked blue collar wages and employment in the last generation are now being felt by professionals; lawyers, journalists and professors now share some of the stress steelworkers have known for decades, and they don't like it, and are very good at squealing." -- Walter Russell Mead
"One of the toughest morals of the globalization of industry is that only the best companies can expect to survive -- and then, generally, on shorter rations. The moral is applicable to an uncomfortably large number of [...] industries, including [automobiles,] banking, agriculture and aerospace. The problem generally is going to be to get rid of the corpses -- not to continue to resurrect them." -- David Warsh
I work a lot with AI and the law. The biggest question I get from attorneys is, obviously, whether they’re going to have a job next year. The answer is: definitely, but you need to learn to use AI. AI isn’t anywhere near robot-lawyers, but in five years being a lawyer who refuses to use AI is going to be like being a mathematician who insists on using an abacus.
Im talking out of my ass, but I do get the feeling that it might be similar in your industry. It’s not like “the law” writ large isn’t going to shed jobs because of AI, but right now those are the law-adjacent jobs that went offshore ages ago. I’d be more worried if I lived in India. All those data entry armies are fucked.
People aren’t going to need writers to produce really simple copy or designers for basic logos as much, but most of the work is going to be for people who wouldn’t have paid for it anyway. A cool AI picture in your Substack; some language for your website. That’s not nothing, but “automated playwright” it isn’t.
Musicians survived just fine through the phonograph, the radio, electric keyboards. I expect this will end much the same. The job will change but the demand won’t. I hope.
All good points my learned friend - I actually wrote quite a few stories back in the day about 'legaltech' entrepreneurs who were offering cut-price service by either automating or outsourcing (usually to the Philippines, in the case of Australian firms) as much as possible. I hope your hopes are realised re job change rather than job destruction.
You're right, but not quite right. Generally, these transitions don't reduce the *amount produced* but they dramatically reduce the *number of producers*. Indeed, in most cases, the decline in the price of the product increases the amount consumed.
Consider farming: A couple of hundred years ago, maybe 90% of Americans were farmers. A hundred years ago, probably 50% still were. It's down to about 2% now, and everybody is a lot fatter than they were before. But a lot of people have moved out of the farming business. Music has been like that, it used to be that bars and cafes had bands that played in the evening, now they use recorded music. What's really been lost is the half-decently-paid lower tier of music; if you aren't good enough to play in a symphony, you probably can't get paid to play music at all.