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These Are the Jobs People Actually WANT AI to Automate

31m 38s

These Are the Jobs People Actually WANT AI to Automate

The podcast sponsored by Google explores the desire for AI automation in various roles and highlights Google's processing of 1.3 quadrillion tokens each month. Meta attracts attention by poaching high-profile AI researcher Andrew Tullock from Thinking Machines Labs. On the geopolitical front, China tightens control over Nvidia chip imports, while the Dutch government seizes a Chinese-owned chipmaker. Additionally, a study by Harvard Business School reveals public willingness to automate occupations with AI, showing support for automation in 30% of occupations, which doubles to 58% when AI is perceived to outperform humans at lower costs. Certain occupations like caregiving remain off-limits due to moral concerns. The research categorizes occupations based on technical feasibility and moral repugnance towards AI, shedding light on public attitudes towards AI job replacement.

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6140 Words, 36891 Characters

This podcast is supported by Google. Hey folks, Steven Johnson here, co-founder of Notebook LM. As an author, I've always been obsessed with how software could help organize ideas and make connections. So we built Notebook LM as an AI-first tool for anyone trying to make sense of complex information. Upload your documents and Notebook LM instantly becomes your personal expert uncovering insights and helping you brainstorm. Try it at notebooklm.google.com. Today on the AI Daily Brief, these are the roles that people actually want AI to automate. Before that on the headlines, Google is now processing 1.3 quadrillion tokens each month. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. All right, friends, quick notes before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, Gemini, Robots and Pencils, Notion, Insightwise and Superintelligent. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidalybrief or you can subscribe on Apple podcasts. And if you are interested in sponsoring the show, send us a note at [email protected]. Right now there are still some good slots open in Q1, but I have a feeling that that is going to turn very quickly. So if you are at all interested and even if you just want some information, again, shoot us a note at [email protected]. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief headlines edition. All the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. We kick off today with an update from Google, where that company is now pumping out 1.3 quadrillion tokens a month to serve their AI products. You might remember back earlier this year when between May and July, we saw this massive inflection point where Google went from processing 480 trillion tokens in May, all the way up to 980 trillion towards the end of July. That was monthly tokens, by the way. So about 104% growth in just a couple of months. My speculation was this was due, in part, to the expansion of actual deployment use cases, particularly around AI coding, that was just consuming a huge amount of additional tokens. But whatever was driving it, it's clear that usage of AI is going up, up, up. Now, Google DeepMind CEO, Demis Asabis, recognized that at this scale, the numbers are frankly getting a little bit difficult to comprehend. A quadrillion has 15 zeros in it. And to reframe that 1.3 quadrillion number, he says, that's 500 million tokens a second or 1.8 trillion tokens an hour. Now, this is not the only indication that Gemini is undergoing some serious growth right now. The latest edition of SimilarWeb's traffic report showed that Gemini was by far and away the big leader for AI platform growth in September. The Gemini web app saw a 46% jump in traffic, which was more than triple the increase for perplexity, which was in second place with a little over a 14% jump. That report, by the way, also noted that DeepSeek notched its first month of growth since February. And also that traffic to the GROC web app was the only one that had dropped falling by 7.4%. Now, similar web stats are a very light touch metric and not something that we should overly index on. This looks only at traffic to web apps, doesn't really reflect usage at all on mobile apps, and for something like GROC, it gets most of its use through the X platform, so we actually don't know what the overall usage of GROC looked like last month versus in August. But still, with all that said, what's undeniable from the report is that Gemini is growing at a tremendous rate. Between that and an overcoming chat GBT in the app store for a time before Sora kicked it all back up, the race between chat GBT and Gemini keeps getting tighter and tighter. Plus, as the AI for success account points out, I wonder what will happen when they release Gemini 3.0 Flash and Gemini 3.0 Pro in a few weeks. Next up today, if you thought the risk of Mark Zuckerberg poaching your big talent was over, think again. Meta has poached another very high-profile AI researcher to add to their superintelligence lab. The Wall Street Journal reports that no less than a founding member of Thinking Machines Labs, Andrew Tullock, has left to join Meta in forming coworkers of his decision on Friday. Tullock left OpenAI in 2024 to found TML with Mirror Merati and several other departing OpenAI leaders. Prior to joining OpenAI in 2023, he had spent a decade at Meta as a machine learning engineer. Confirming his resignation on Saturday, a spokesperson for TML said Andrew has decided to pursue a different path for personal reasons. And according to rumors, it sounds like it may have been well over a billion reasons. Back in August, the Wall Street Journal reported that Tullock had turned down a six-year $1.5 billion offer from Meta. The story went viral, serving as the first solid reporting that Zuckerberg was personally recruiting AI researchers and offering 10-figure deals to top talent. Tullock was in fact the poster boy for the billion-dollar talent war that captured the narrative over the summer. Now at the time, Meta said that the description of a billion-dollar offer was inaccurate and ridiculous, adding that any compensation package was predicated on Meta stock rising, which frankly is a little bit of a non-denial regarding the maximum size of the comp package. Overall, that article had been focused on an overall buyout offer to Thinking Machine's lab, which was turned down. The tone emphasized that none of the leading researchers at the startup had accepted Meta's offer. Reportedly, more than a dozen TML researchers were contacted by Zuckerberg over the summer. Now there are a million different lines of speculation out there. The rumor that is flying around X is that this was a $3.5 billion offer. I don't know where that got started. I've seen no evidence to support it. The other, and to me, more compelling consideration that some are sharing, is that this might reflect some amount of an assessment of the widening gap between the available resources in the sector, despite being one of the most well-funded early-stage startups in the history of Silicon Valley. The resources available to TML in terms of compute and infrastructure are a tiny sliver of what is available to Meta. Ultimately, we don't know if that's the reason or personal compensation or something else entirely is the reason that these moves have happened. But as many people are pointing out, Lama 5 better deliver. Moving back over to Elon's world for a minute, XAI is joining the race to develop world models. Financial Times reports that XAI hired a pair of researchers away from NVIDIA over the summer to work on the technology. NVIDIA, through its omniverse platform, has been one of the leaders in practical world models used to train embodied AI in simulated environments. Google and Fei-Fei Li's world labs have also made significant progress, though their demos have been more focused on generating interactive video. Through Tesla's cars and robots, XAI could have an opportunity to pair world models with actual embodied AI. But that said, Elon Musk appears to be thinking about a different application as well. Posting last week, the XAI game studio will release a great AI-generated game before the end of the year. XAI is currently hiring technical staff for an omni-team, which "creates magical AI experiences "beyond text, enabling understanding "and generation of content across various modalities, "including image, video, and audio." Among the roles is a video game tutor who will teach GROC to produce video games. The goal it says is to allow users to explore AI-assisted game design. Some think this is a clever short-term play from Elon. Phil Truby writes, "Classic Elon strategy. "World models are proving to be needed "for robots like Optimus, "but Optimus revenue is years away. "However, world models can also be used sooner "for AI-native video games. "Thus, Elon is creating near-term revenue "for this otherwise long-term technology." Now, one of the things always lurking behind people's minds is will there come a point where Elon decides that it makes sense to try to fold everything altogether under, for example, the banner of Tesla? In that light, could this be a medium-term play to create a narrative that Tesla should buy out XAI? Remains to be seen, but regardless, it is super interesting that XAI is jumping into the world model space as well. Lastly today, escalation in the chip war as China cracks down on Nvidia imports and the Dutch government seizes a Chinese chipmaker. If you're paying attention to the broader market at all, you will not need me to tell you that trade war tensions hit a fever pitch this weekend in the lead-up to talks between the Trump administration and Beijing. AI chips were just one front in the all-encompassing trade war. On Friday, the Financial Times broke news that Chinese authorities had begun to crack down on firms importing Nvidia chips. They wrote that customs officers have been mobilized at major ports, searching for H20 and RTX Pro 6000D chips that are designed to meet US export controls. One source told the FT that Chinese authorities were also looking for more advanced chips that were smuggled into the country and breach of US policy. In the West, we had heard that Beijing had discouraged quote-unquote firms from importing Nvidia chips, but it seems that that was a little more than a suggestion. Alongside cargo searches, officials are also pouring over documentation to see if firms made false declarations about importing Nvidia chips in the past. In a strange twist, Beijing now appears to be far more concerned about stopping the flow of advanced AI chips than even the biggest China hawks in Washington. Then breaking overnight on Sunday, the Dutch government has seized control of a Chinese-owned chip maker. Nexperia is a Dutch subsidiary of Wingtec Technology, which specializes in the production of high-volume, low-end chips for automotive and consumer electronics. On Sunday evening local time, the Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs revealed that the Goods Availability Act had been invoked in September to seize the company the first time that that 1952 law had ever been used. He said that the move was made in order to, quote, "prevent the situation in which the goods produced by Nexperia, finished and semi-finished products, would become unavailable in an emergency." A government statement said that the highly exceptional decision had been made after the ministry observed recent and acute signals of serious governance shortcomings and actions. Wingtec responded in a now-deleted WeChat post, "The Dutch government's decision to freeze Nexperia's global operations under the pretext of national security constitutes excessive intervention driven by geopolitical bias, rather than a fact-based risk assessment." N-Game Macro writes, "What's happening with Nexperia goes way beyond a simple regulatory move by the Dutch government. This is a frontline moment in the global tech power struggle between the West and China." On paper, the Netherlands says it's stepping in because of administrative shortcomings and national security risks, but in reality, this is about cutting off one of China's quiet back doors into Western chip technology. Nexperia may be based in Europe, but it's owned by China's Wingtec, and the fear is that valuable know-how could end up back in Chinese hands. Whatever the case, it is a major escalation and just shows how many dimensions to this crazy AI story there are right now. That, however, is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief Headlines edition. Next up, the main episode. Small, nimble teams beat bloated consulting every time. Robots and pencils partners with organizations on intelligent, cloud-native systems powered by AI. They cover human needs, design AI solutions, and cut through complexity to deliver meaningful impact without the layers of bureaucracy. As an AWS certified partner, Robots and Pencils combines the reach of a large firm with the focus of a trusted partner. With teams across the US, Canada, Europe, and Latin America, clients gain local expertise and global scale. As AI evolves, they ensure you keep peace with change, and that means faster results, measurable outcomes, and a partnership built to last. The right partner makes progress inevitable. Partner with Robots and Pencils at robotsandpencils.com/aidailybrief. Chatbots are great, but they can only take you so far. I've recently been testing Notions' new AI agents, and they are a very different type of experience. These are agents that actually complete entire workflows for you in your style, and best of all, they work in a channel that you already know and love because they are purpose-built Notion super-users. Notions' new AI agents completely expands the range of what Notion can do. It can now build documents from your entire company's knowledge base, organize scattered information into organized reports, basically do tasks that used to take days, and get them complete in minutes. These agents don't just help with work, they finish it. Getting started with building on Notion is easier than ever. Notion agents are now your very own super user to help you onboard in minutes. Your AI teammates are ready to work. Try Notion AI for free at the link in our show notes. As a consultant, responding to proposals can often feel like playing tennis against a wall. You're serving against yourself, trying to guess what the client really wants. That all changes with the InsightWise proposals platform. Now you've got an AI coach that thinks just like your client. It returns to the brief time and time again, identifying opportunities, showcasing your track record, and making recommendations to improve your pitch. Suddenly you're on center court, but this time you've got a secret weapon. InsightWise does away with all the time-consuming manual work so you can focus on winning more business more often. Generate reports, pull insights from your own data, build competitive advantage, and go to sleep before 2 a.m. When it comes to proposals, you only get one shot. With InsightWise, make yours an ace. Go to insightwise.ai to start your free trial today. Today's episode is brought to you by Super Intelligent. Now for those of you who don't know who are new here maybe, Super Intelligent is actually my company. We started it because every single company we talk to, all the enterprises out there, are trying to figure out what AI can do for them, but most of the advice is super generic, not specific to your company. So what we do is we map your AI and agent opportunities by deploying voice agents to interview your teams about how work works now and how your people would like it to work in the future. The result is an AI action map with high potential ROI use cases and specific change management needs, basically everything you need to go actually deliver AI value. Go to bsuper.ai to learn more. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. As time goes on and people get more acclimated to AI simply being a part of the society that we live in, the discourse has naturally shifted from a high level binaries and generics like will AI take our jobs or even silly little aphorisms like your job won't be taken by AI but by someone using AI into deeper analysis around where AI is actually useful, how it's evolving and importantly more recently where people want AI to be involved. You might remember this study that we covered earlier this year from Stanford that divided tasks into four different zones based on how good AI was at doing those things and how much workers wanted them to do those things. There was a green light zone which was things that AI was good at and that people were very excited for AI to do, a red light zone which was things that AI was good at but that workers didn't want AI to do, a yellow zone which was things that people wanted AI to do but where capabilities were a little bit low and then a low priority zone which was where AI couldn't do things or they were particularly hard and where people didn't really want AI to do those things. Now this was super interesting to me, it's become a part of basically every keynote that I give because again, it gets out of these binaries and starts to get into actual expressed human preferences from people on the ground who don't really have time for all these big philosophical debates, they're just trying to figure out how AI is or isn't going to be useful in their own jobs and what it's going to mean for their careers moving forward. Well, now we have something that almost forms an interesting companion study. Earlier this month, researchers from Harvard Business School took a fresh look at AI job replacement. Now, instead of coming from the angle of how capable AI was at performing certain tasks or trying to figure out how many jobs AI would replace, they instead asked people broadly how they feel about AI stepping in for humans in various occupations. In the abstract the researchers wrote, despite cultural anxiety about artificial intelligence displacing human workers, we find that Americans show surprising willingness to cede most occupations to machines. Given current AI capabilities, the public already supports automating 30% of occupations. When AI is described as outperforming humans at lower cost, support for automation nearly doubles to 58% of occupations. In other words, where AI is competent and cheap, in many areas there isn't all that much moral objection to AI replacing humans. However, the researchers continued that there are a narrow subset representing around 12% of occupations that include things like caregiving, therapy and spiritual leadership that remain categorically off limits because automation in those areas is seen as, in their words, morally repugnant. They write, this shift reveals that for most occupations, resistance to AI is rooted in performance concerns that fade as AI capabilities improve rather than principled objections about what work must remain human. Now, the chart that got shared all over the internet was this one, another four quadrant chart. On the x-axis we have technical feasibility, i.e. the percentage of tasks that are exposed to AI and on the y-axis, we have what they call moral repugnance towards AI. The four quadrants then are, in this case, the green quadrant is in the lower right, that's low moral repugnance towards AI and high capability. This is their no friction quadrant. Above that, in the capable but repugnant, which is sort of like their yellow light category, which they call moral friction, that's where there's high AI capability, but also high moral repugnance towards AI, their red quadrant is where there is dual friction, low capability and high repugnance, and their blue quadrant, which is sort of like the opportunity quadrant of the other study that we just saw, is called technical friction where there is moral permissibility but low capability. So let's talk about some of the types of jobs that are in each of these areas. And let's do it in that order. On the no friction side, where there is high capability and low repugnance, there are a lot of white collar jobs. Search market strategists, financial quantitative analysts, economists, special effects artists, all of those are in the green quadrant. Now again, I will remind you that while the other study is about what workers in those areas thought, this is about what the broader public thinks. In other words, this is the broader public looking in on other people's jobs and saying whether they're fine with those jobs being automated, it's not people self assessing. In the next quadrant, the moral friction quadrant where AI is capable, but there is higher moral repugnance. Some of the call out examples include sociologists, history teachers, fraud examiners, OBGYNs, legislators and school psychologists. Basically, even if chat GPT can theoretically give advice to students, that's not really something that people are super stoked on. In the dual friction category where there is both low capability from AI and high moral repugnance, they have nuclear technicians, oral surgeons, bailiffs and nannies. Apparently even if we solve the problems of humanoid robots, people aren't willing to give their kids over to them just quite yet. And then over in the blue area, which again is sort of an opportunity area of technical friction where there is moral permissibility, but low capability, they have things like semiconductor technicians, cashiers, mail sorters, gambling dealers and conveyor operators. Of course, if you are a startup who is thinking about areas where you could vertically design AI solutions without people being mad at you, that blue area might be a place to look. Now, Eric Brenlofsen, one of the authors of the earlier task-based study saw this new one and made the comparison directly, saying, "It's interesting to compare their chart with what we found when we asked the workers themselves what they want." Matt Beane from MIT Sloan actually ran the two studies through ChatGBT to compare with Bringleson of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab then synthesizing the analysis into a table. This new four quadrant chart had on the X-axis, worker automation desire and on the Y-axis, public moral acceptability. So for this then, green light, which was high moral acceptability and higher worker automation desire, that was things like scheduling and reminders, payroll, error fixes, records upkeeping, standardized reporting and database maintenance. It will not surprise you at all, especially if you listened to yesterday's episode about where we're starting to see AI deployed. These are in these areas where there's high value to getting it automated and people very much not protective of those areas. The next quadrant, where there is public moral acceptability, they called augment carefully or co-pilot by default, in other words, a human using an AI is probably the way to go versus handing it over to an agent. That included things like assign and allocate stories, film editing and cuts, graphic layouts and find a unique fact research. I think this is a really revealing quadrant because if you take a step back, one of the things that these studies are telling us is that workers have a higher threshold for what they want in their job automated as opposed to people outside their job. People outside of their job ask whether certain tasks within their job are okay to automate basically are in many cases saying, sure, why not? Even though the people who are doing those jobs say that there's something important or distinct about the human touch that they want to preserve. I think that's why you're seeing things like film editing and cuts where the people who are doing that understand what makes the difference between a really great version of that and an only okay version of that. Whereas from the public at large who doesn't know about that craft doesn't necessarily see it as craft, they just see it as something to get done and version A done by a human craftsperson versus version B done by a robot doesn't particularly matter to them. One of the real interesting challenges that we will face as a society is how to navigate the lines between what the people on the front lines who are doing a particular job think and where broader public sentiment is. That's that quadrant that's going to see the most of that particular question. Now over on the other side where worker automation desire is high but moral acceptability is low is kind of the inverse of that. Where workers who are on the front lines think that there's more room to automate than people who are looking from outside who find it morally repugnant. This quadrant they call assistive only and included by way of example care and therapy intake summaries. Someone pointed out that this is actually one of the areas where the Harvard study shows its limitations. Matt underscore amp on Twitter wrote each caregiving is where automation can make the most difference if deployed appropriately. No more elder neglect while warehouse and care homes administered by underpaid overwork staff. And to try to interpret this a little bit the broader public is saying absolutely not we should not have AI taking care of sick or elderly people. That is a job that is for humans. It is distinctly of humans. We should have humans doing that. That's the lens through which they're interpreting it. However, what this combined chart is showing is that the people who are in that role understand that there are parts of this that are absolutely and incredibly valuable to automate. As Matt points out, many of the facilities where this type of caregiving happens are plagued by the problems of as he puts it underpaid overwork staff. To the extent that AI can take off big chunks of for example, administrative work that allows them to just stay focused on the already emotionally taxing parts of human caregiving. There are probably really big benefits to be had from that. And this is of course why it's going to be so important to not stay on the role level analysis but actually get into task level analysis. In many ways I think that the best way to look at AI related job displacement is from a additive task kind of level. In other words, you take it from the task level. Can AI and should AI automate a particular task? And then from there you look at what percentage of a particular role as it's currently constituted is tasks that can be automated. So instead of saying we're trying to automate role X, you instead say automation can do 70% of the work of that role. And then we get to ask at what threshold that role needs to change. Does the role stay the same but there's just fewer of those people? Is that role rolled into another role? Where the role's objectives are fundamentally changed based on the new capabilities that AI offers. That's the sort of nuance change that I think is going to happen much more than just job gone. See you later. Which is of course the popular media kind of view which we'll get into in just a minute. The last area on the combined chart is where worker automation desire is low and public moral acceptability is low. Which the AI summarization calls to first study or govern pilots but which I think a lot of people are fine pretty much leaving off of the focus area for AI right now. This is things like final hiring and firing, parole and probation risk calls and ethics reviews and IRB style oversight. I think that both of these studies on their own are really valuable but I think taken together they represent something entirely different. This is actually the beginning of a map of where society thinks AI can and should be valuable and where AI should be deployed to help move things forward. Now take that analysis as compared to another recent study that got a bunch of attention last week that was a Senate report that found 100 million US jobs could be replaced over the next decade. The report was conducted by Democrat staffers on the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee. Staff reviewed economic data, investor transcripts and corporate financial filings to come up with this number. However, the main source of data was chatGPT itself. The chatbot told staffers that AI and automation could replace nearly 100 million jobs over the next 10 years. That includes displacing 89% of fast food and counter workers, 64% of accountants and 47% of truck drivers. Across the 20 workforces that chatGPT said would be most affected, it said that 15 of them would see half of jobs displaced by AI and automation. Now 100 million jobs would obviously be a catastrophic number well over half of the current 170 million strong US workforce. Staffers did acknowledge that the methodology was a little questionable writing. The reality is no one knows exactly what will happen. There is tremendous uncertainty about the real capabilities of AI and automation, their effects on the rest of the economy and how governments and markets will respond. While this basic analysis reflects all the inherent limitations of chatGPT, it represents one potential future in which corporations decide to aggressively push forward with artificial labor. The report also noted that this change is far more rapid than previous economic disruptions, giving a greater sense of urgency. Staffers wrote, the agricultural revolution unfolded over thousands of years. The industrial revolution took more than a century. Artificial labor could reshape the economy in less than a decade. Now the point of the report ultimately was not to generate an accurate number of jobs under threat. It was to stir up conversation and provoke a policy response to the looming issue. Some of the many AI leaders have called for as well. The report recommended adopting a 32 hour work week, increasing worker protections, a $17 minimum wage and elimination of tax breaks for companies that automate their workforce. In an accompanying op-ed in Fox News last week, Senator Sanders argued that quote, "The rapid developments in AI will likely have a profoundly dehumanizing impact on us all. We do not simply need a more efficient society, we need a world where people live healthier, happier and more fulfilling lives." I've said before in something that might surprise some people that I've actually appreciated over time, Senator Sanders' approach to this particular conversation. And the reason is spelled out right here in the first line in this essay. He writes, everybody agrees that AI and robotics are going to have a transformative impact on our country and the world. And yet I've seen in the past how when it comes to a new technology, the tendency for the side that doesn't like the technology is actually to try to strangle it in its crib before it gets out and impacts the world. Now it may seem obvious that AI is beyond that stage, but I don't mind someone like Bernie Sanders taking the position that AI is here, it's real and trying to bring up this conversation around what the new social contract in the context of AI looks like. I don't agree with a lot of the foundational arguments that he has about the motivations for why this technology is being created. And I don't agree with a lot of the remediations he's suggesting, but this conversation that presumes that AI is here and that it will have an impact on real people's real lives in ways that are so significant that they could change the shape of the economy in ways that demand a new social contract conversation is something that I agree with. We've forgotten this recently, but the foundation of democratic society isn't everyone agreeing. It's everyone being able to have good faith conversations that start from some shared consensus about what reality is. So TLDR, I don't think we're likely to see a hundred million jobs ripped away, but I don't mind the starting conversation being should we nudge what we consider a full work week down to 32 hours. Now, one interesting article that I also noted from last week that I also think optimistically shows just how little we know about how this is all going to play out and why we can't make too many assumptions before we see it in the real world. Back in May, a business services company called Housecall Pro surveyed 400 home service professionals in an attempt to figure out how AI adoption was playing out in blue collar professions. They were so struck by the level of adoption that they named the report the AI assisted trades pro, how the field is leading the future of work. The survey found that 40% of these pros actively use AI and 60% were using AI at least somewhat. The pros were using AI for content as well as administrative tasks. The pros reported saving an average of 3.2 hours a week using AI. That's 160 hours for a year for professions that are largely small business or owner operated, enough to really move the needle. When you are saving the equivalent of four full weeks of administrative work per year, that is unbelievably high impact. Now in that report, cleaning professionals were the most common users, while electric professionals were the most satisfied with AI. Another big takeaway was that AI was not replacing blue collar workers at all, even though it was delivering huge time savings. 73% of the pros surveyed said that AI had not impacted their hiring rates. Now CNN recently covered the survey and tried to track down some of these AI-augmented plumbers and electricians. They found Oak Creek plumbing and remodeling in Milwaukee, who now have 20 plumbers all using AI. Company president Dan Cowley said, "It's definitely been worth the investment. Some of our older guys have learned to ask ChatGPT the right questions and they're kind of amazed with some of the answers it comes up with." He noted that the AI boost is now showing up in on the ground troubleshooting just as much as behind the scenes admin. He commented, "It's affecting both sides of our company out in the field and internally within our office." Another company, Gulfshore Air Conditioning and Heating in Niceville, Florida, has implemented a fully AI bookings and request system. Once the technician arrives, they use AI to diagnose the issue and pull up the relevant technical information in seconds. The process used to mean sifting through multiple lengthy manuals searching for the right fix. Gulfshore has also used AI to optimize their marketing campaigns, which caused a huge bump in revenue. Surprisingly then, these trade professions have turned out to be a perfect testing ground for AI. They require an immense library of technical knowledge, as well as having the experience to know the tricks of the trade. Being able to access the entire internet in every technical manual ever produced isn't a replacement for decades of experience, but boy, does it help that experience figure out what's actually going on much more quickly. These trades also require a ton of tedious booking management and administrative support. Going back to that original study is work that most workers would happily automate away. Laura Ulrich, an economist at JobSite Indeed, commented, "People go into the trades because they like doing the hands-on work itself. And if some of the administrative tasks can be automated, then that should help those workers lean into the parts of the job they like and do smarter work." Crystal Lander, the marketing and IT manager for Gulfshore, commented, "All of our technicians are running more efficiently and they're less stressed. I feel like I'm a real-life Jetson living in the future." Now, I am very wary on this show of being Pollyannish about the real challenge that the AI transition is going to represent. As I've said before, and I will continue to say, I am extremely bullish on the long term. I think that AI is going to unlock more creation, more business, just more of everything, including more jobs. However, I think that the disruption along the way is going to be enormously painful. And I do think beyond a shadow of a doubt, it is going to be significant enough that we have to have a conversation about a new social contract and what we expect from people to be full contributors to society in a world where AI can just do much more of the work. What's encouraging to me is that between these studies and these real on-the-ground lived examples, we're starting to move beyond a blithe generic could-be theoretical future fan fiction type scenarios and actually understand what's happening in practice and what people think in aggregate and in specific. That leaves us in a much better position to actually have the conversations we need to have to make this AI era our best one yet. For now, though, that's going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening or watching as always. And until next time, peace. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. The podcast discusses roles people want AI to automate and Google's processing of 1.3 quadrillion tokens monthly.
  2. Meta poaches a high-profile AI researcher, Andrew Tullock, from Thinking Machines Labs.
  3. China cracks down on Nvidia chip imports, and the Dutch government seizes control of a Chinese chipmaker.
  4. Harvard Business School researchers study public willingness to automate occupations with AI.

Summary:

3 quadrillion tokens each month. Meta attracts attention by poaching high-profile AI researcher Andrew Tullock from Thinking Machines Labs. On the geopolitical front, China tightens control over Nvidia chip imports, while the Dutch government seizes a Chinese-owned chipmaker.

Additionally, a study by Harvard Business School reveals public willingness to automate occupations with AI, showing support for automation in 30% of occupations, which doubles to 58% when AI is perceived to outperform humans at lower costs. Certain occupations like caregiving remain off-limits due to moral concerns. The research categorizes occupations based on technical feasibility and moral repugnance towards AI, shedding light on public attitudes towards AI job replacement.

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Americans show surprising willingness to automate a significant percentage of occupations with AI, especially when AI is described as outperforming humans at a lower cost.

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