Is AI Reshaping the Future of Work

Transcript

Ken Fisher:

So job wise, a couple of things clutter people's minds now. And I'm going to speak to both of them to try to offer some sense of clarity. One of them is do layoffs and unemployment and a well noted lack of aggressive corporate hiring signal recession ahead? And the other is will AI destroy jobs net in a significant way? Will AI be a job killer?

Now, on the first, let me just say I understand exactly why people fear this, but it's a specific example of a category of things that I've spoken about and written about often over the decades. Whenever we have a thing, whatever that thing is, that happens and you can measure it and it goes on continuously over a long period of time. Which is true of layoffs, it's true of unemployment, and it's true of corporate hiring numbers. But it's also true of so many other things where we have continuous series over a long period of time. And then you have other series you can track them against to see if the one causes the other.

If the one causes the other, it's got to correlate with it. It's got to move with it. It's got to go up with it or down with it. Maybe in advance, maybe. But if they don't correlate highly, there's no there there. And if there's no there there, then the answer to the question, as the question is framed, is simply no, they won't. And in this one, simply, no they won't. Employment numbers are not predictive. Unemployment numbers are not predictive. Today's corporate hiring is not predictive of tomorrow's corporate hiring or the business environment as a whole. These three are not predictive of GDP. They're not leading indicators. You can take them and put them into the don't think about them as canaries in the coal mine forecasters, harbingers, risk warners, anything like that.

On AI, let me just say that there's the part you can say and the part you can't say. You can say anything you want, but simply, we know that every evolution in technology that becomes mass deployed throughout the society will truncate some jobs of some types. You know, when I was young, you used to see ads on television in the early days of television that you should buy Maytag appliances because of the Maytag repairman who was going to come to your house and be able to repair them when they broke. And if you think of appliances, and then there used to be a lot of types of appliance repair people. But if you think about what technology has done, it's eliminated most of those appliance repair functions completely. Some appliances you took to some place to get them fixed, some appliances people came to your house to fix. But all that world has largely gone away. The flight reservation person at the airport has gone away. It's all been replaced by technology.

AI will replace a lot of jobs. Can we predict exactly which ones they are? No. But categorically, you can say that they are the ones that take the least creativity and originality, and are the least complicated. AI's got some really impressive features to it in terms of being able to act like what once was something that you either engaged in repetitively, take this and turn it into that. Take this and turn it into that. Take this and turn it into that. AI can do that in a heartbeat. Or like a library that you had to laboriously research and get the consensus out of that library fast and easy. I mean, that's what AI does here and now readily, and will replace a lot of jobs in that regard. But the flip side of every part of this, including going back to the internet, and going back once upon a time to the transistor radio in the 1950s, is every one of these things also offers new jobs of different forms. And that's the problem that we have difficulty understanding correctly. Because we can't today think through with any real accuracy, what are the new jobs exactly that AI will create? Will it? Absolutely. Will there be a lot of them? Absolutely. Do we know what they are? Not really. That's part of the problem.

Let me step that back to a bigger picture. And I read about this a lot actually, when I was in college. Robert Heilbroner wrote about this a lot before I was in college, and I had a professor that made me read a lot of Robert Heilbroner. The reality of totalitarian government is, they come up with plans to do things that they think will be good. And so everyone can see if the plan works. This is what it'll do. It'll create these things. Put in this over here. Change this to that. Here's where we're going. Here's what we want to get done. You can have hopes for this thing. And those things might work and they might not, depending on how well the government can implement those things. Right.

With capitalism, you can never figure out what the innovations are that are 20 years away. The history of future is trying to tell you how our culture and our life and our new jobs, and all of the new things that come through capitalism will be 20, 30, 40 years from now. Actually, when you look at them in retrospect, always end up sounding like some kind of thing that Walt Disney might have created in a cartoon in the 1940s. It sounds like Looney Tunes. But in reality, capitalism has come up with a steady stream of creativity and new things that helped people. That gave people things that didn't exist before or they existed before, but not nearly in as good a format that helped people. And capitalism has been the greatest creator of new, never yet done, better stuff that aid people and help humanity. People have a hard time always, I mean it's impossible, effectively with any detail seeing that next ten years of innovation. And the same will be true with how AI is deployed. We won't see exactly where the new jobs will come, but it'll kill a lot of jobs. That's easier to see. And it'll also create new jobs. And the new jobs that it creates may or may not be as many as the jobs it kills.

But culture always biases on the, oh we can see where it might kill this one, it might kill that one, might kill those. It biases on believing in the negative side, not believing in the fact that there's going to be this positive side. You just can't put any specificity to it. So my concluding point would be, yes, it'll kill jobs. Do we know exactly which ones? No. Do we know the kind of categories they'll be in? Yes. And it'll create a lot of new jobs. But we can't know those very precisely at all.

Thank you much. Hi, this is Ken Fisher. Subscribe to the Fisher Investment YouTube channel. If you like what you've seen. Click the bell to be notified as soon as we publish new videos.