AI versus Marshy - An argument for jobs staying around instead of AI taking them

If you’re new to this newsletter, you might have missed our previous discussions on using AI for personalized video outreach and the AI vs job debate. Let’s dive right in and explore an interesting argument from Noah Smith that suggests jobs might not be as threatened by AI as we think. It’s hard to fathom because there’s so much automation, duplication, and replication going on out there. This idea connects to one shared from Shane Parrish’s Clear Thinking . He shares a criteria exercise later in the book that forces you to rank decision factors against each other - imagine them on post-its contesting each other. Is this more important or this? If you did this for every decision criteria - you WOULD get to the one that is the most important. There’s always one most important thing. The same thing goes for our jobs. Eventually all of us are going to be the best at ONE thing over everyone else. That’s comparative advantage at work. I knew this topic was a bit more thinky, so tried to illustrate it on a whiteboard comparing breathing, writing, and eating pies as an example. I’m going to go ahead and say, step away from the whiteboard Marshy. I then fed it into ChatGPT and tidied it up in an image editor. Better than the whiteboard but still fun and weird. We’re all going to be the best at something. So all that’s left to solve is wicked problems like: ​ “how do we get the human race to behave in its collective and existential best interests?” ​ I’m not sure how that one gets solved yet. Reverse engineering your job prospects Via me . My friend Sam said learning how to use AI for career development would be something he’d find useful. Originally appeared in newsletter : AI versus Marshy #40: video outreach, comparing your job, and getting better jobs