Evolution of jobs

I remember when I was a kid in the 90s, my mother, a pharmacist in the hospital, telling me about her struggles with the new computers she had to use. She felt like these computers were stupid tools because they didn't understand her, and she often came home disturbed and uncomfortable with this new way of working. It was not a choice of her to use them, it was kind of forced with limited bandwith to adapt to it, and that was a bad feeling.

At the same time, I remember my own passion for tech growing, wondering why my mother was so bothered by it while I found so much joy in it.

Jobs have always evolved over time. One notable example is the blacksmith, a profession that saw significant growth from the Middle Ages with the development of the population and the strong need for the agricultural world.

Picture from original blog post on blacksmith in France

Shoeing horses was an important job, but it completely disappeared with the advent of the motorized vehicles. This transformation changed lives across generations. It took decades to evolve from blacksmith to garage.

Infrastructure and value-added services evolved in parallel at the time

Nowadays computers and internet are everywhere, the infrastructure is in place. And the new value-added services evolve faster within the same infrastructure.

That's a unique shift in human history. Today, we see technologies that transform lives multiple times within a single generation via the same infrastructure.

Changes that historically took long periods, decades or generations, are now happening multiple times per life. For example, we've already experience the impact on businesses in less than 3 decades of the Internet, emails, mobile services and cloud services.

We can illustrate this by how a desk looked like in the 90s vs now:

Image from https://www.geekyedge.com/evolution-office-desk/

How people and companies navigate troughout a new paradigm?

The impact of AI, for example, is already affecting many professions. As a society, we need to consider how we will transform many people's jobs in light of these rapid changes.

I recently read a letter from Bill Gates about his visit to a school that has been piloting an AI solution. He met with students, teachers, and school leaders to understand how this new approach to education is being used.

What stood out to me was how each teacher was enabled to use the AI tools in the way they wanted.

This flexibility allowed them to tailor the technology to fit their unique teaching styles and classroom needs. For example, an eighth-grade algebra teacher used AI to create problem sets about local heroes, while a third-grade teacher customized lesson hooks to match her students' interests in Pokémon and Roblox.

This testimony reinforces my belief that AI tools are revolutionizing job evolution rather than causing job loss.

There is a strong parallel in how companies must lead their AI integration projects to make them a success. Just like in education, providing the right tools and allowing flexibility can lead to remarkable outcomes.

Firsthand, I've observed this in recruitment and consulting projects involving hundreds of users. The successful adoption and flexibility of use of AI assistants tailored to their needs significantly contributed to project successes, while lack of choice led to abandoned prototypes.

Allowing users to choose has been vital for the adoption and efficient utilization of these new AI solutions.

How much of our job AI is able to transform?

Personal analysis => Job = {task(i)}i + {relationships(k)}k

Each job is composed of tasks, ranging from 19 to 42+ cf resources:

• US: https://www.onetonline.org/
• EU: https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/scientific-activities-z/employment/job-tasks-and-work-organisation_en

An example with coding

1) A new network feature between a client and server.

2) Refactoring code for library updates => Link of Amazon CEO tweet:

https://x.com/ajassy/status/1826608791741493281?lang=en