Cal Newport is cutting through the AI clickbait
It is easy to get on the AI hype doom bandwagon.
Concerns about AI wiping out the entire working class or AI doing entire jobs with no need for humans, and market analysis pieces about AI that have the ability to rock the stock market are scary. Not to mention all the articles scaring parents into believing that a traditional education means their children won't prepare them for an AI-dominated world.
I have a tendency to get sucked into the AI doom cycle. It is easy to forgot that these videos and articles are clickbait, designed to generate traffic to blogs and news outlets, and designed to scare you into consuming more such content. It is also easy to forget that these articles are speculation at best, often uninformed and lacking any real basis in reality.
It's for those reasons that I have really enjoyed Cal Newport's much more pragmatic and nuanced perspective on the topic of AI, particularly around how it will affect jobs and our economy.
In fact, what Newport talks about resonates with something I think about a lot - specifically, how much this moment feels like a moment I lived through before.
Like all Xennials, my childhood was an analogue one, free of cell phones, social media, and much technology. I played computer games, but it wasn't until middle school that the World Wide Web became available. By high school, AOL was popular enough such that most of my friends and I had AIM screen names, which followed us to college. During my college years, I spent the day teaching my senior adult counterparts at the nonprofit where I worked how to use email and the internet, and my evenings downloading music from Napster on campus because they had that sweet T1 line. By the time I started my current career in 2004, email and the internet were commonplace (although we still had flip phones). My colleagues were a mix of digital savvy young people who loved Google and older people who insisted on getting information from the library. 🦖
Throughout the early years of my professional career, I watched as older colleagues struggled to adapt. Some did and became as digitally savvy as people half their age. Some failed to adapt entirely or only did so begrudgingly.
The AI moment we are in now feels eerily similar to what I saw in the early 2000s.
But the difference this time around is that the age divide is a little strange. Anecdotally, my cohort seems to be the most AI-forward, perhaps because we have lived through this before. We have seen transition, we know how it works. Some younger colleagues (more the millennial cohort) are more resistant to using AI, while the Gen Zers barely know a world without it and use it as second nature. It is strange and I will be curious to see how the data shakes out by age and field.
We know from experience that massive job loss is not usually what happens in moments like this. Cal Newport talks a lot about how while AI will change things, it's almost certainly not going to destroy jobs as we know them. He goes into great detail in this regard in his response to Matt Shumer's recent article, in which Newport basically calls Shumer out for vastly overstating the effect of AI in the workplace.
I see this at work now. Many of us are using AI even unofficially to do aspects of our work. Many of us have gotten pretty good at using tools like Claude or Gemini to do some of the work related to a task. But AI is a machine, not a human. It cannot, no matter what people say, bring human thought and reasoning to the table. It may sound like it's doing that, but it cannot. It can also not generate data which does not yet exist, a huge limitation in research. Sure, it can analyze existing data and maybe even find connections that would not otherwise be noticeable, but generating data is simply not possible and probably never will be.
This is not to say there won't be some job loss. Just like people in the early 2000s became less employable if they didn't know how to use a computer, people soon will be less employable if they don't know how to use AI. But full-scale replacement of humans by AI will probably never happen.
