To figure out if your job will be replaced by AI, figure out what your job actually is. That was the message of independent analyst Benedict Evans to a room full of graphic designers, marketers, and startup CEOs at the Canva conference. When spreadsheet software was invented, it didn’t eliminate accountants — they increased by 60% over the next decade, according to Census data.
Their job, it turns out, was more than simply adding up numbers, but they offered “experience, authenticity, judgement, reference, curation, suggestion,” Evans said. Elevator operators, however, lost their jobs completely as automatic electric elevators caught on in the mid 20th century. There was a more efficient way to get from one floor to another.
Evans called this the “perfect case of automation,” noting that we don’t think of elevators as being automatic or not anymore. “And that’s probably how it will work” with AI, he said. “Once it works, it’s not AI anymore. It’s just software.”
For now, what workers need to do is figure out what their customers are actually buying, he said: “Do they want something other than just automating the answer?”