Learn AI or become irrelevant

I recently watched a Harvard Business School interview with Dr. Anton Korinek, professor of economics at the University of Virginia. He focuses on the economics of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Dr. Korinek says some shocking things in this interview, in a calm and quiet tone. In his view, reaching AGI would completely transform our economy, making most of the current labour market irrelevant. He suggests that AI will force some form of universal basic income, since a major portion of the white collar workforce will be replaced.

The labour shortages we have talked about for so many years may soon be made irrelevant, when a significant portion of white collar and other procedural work is replaced and structural unemployment soars.

Personally, I am seeing white collar work being replaced first, because it is mostly based on cognitive labour, which AI is beginning to be capable of replacing right now.

In my industry - comms and marketing sector - writing is quickly losing its value as the ability to produce serviceable text by machine becomes commonplace. You can get 1,000 pretty decent words out of an LLM for cents now. So the human added value right now is editing for strategic alignment, style, and tone. However, with the rise of agentic AI, output will be much more reliable in terms of not hallucinating and being « aligned » in terms of value.

That means we are heading away from a written culture toward a much more oral one, where writing is irrelevant for most people as a skill. Just as arithmetic was made irrelevant for most by calculators and watches were made irrelevant by smartphones.

Korinek's advice as an economist is that the best thing a person can learn right now is how to use AI as a force multiplier in their work.

A new world is upon us. Learn how to use AI or become irrelevant.