Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Tasks come first
Picture a team producing a podcast. The searching and research can be offloaded to AI, and a human still asks the questions. AI works like a talented, smart assistant who also makes a lot of mistakes, so offloading too much goes wrong when its answers are not challenged.
Ford and the skeptics
Henry Ford transformed the factory floor with the assembly line. The car then added mobility, which led to billions of opportunities that didn't exist before. That is the creative destruction case, and AI skeptics answer that this time is different, as skeptics did when weavers and mill workers in the United Kingdom faced the Luddite era.
Winner take most
The other side of the ledger is a winner-take-all or winner-take-most market. If scaling goes that way, much of the profit and revenue flows to one or two central models. Companies, law firms, consulting firms, and software firms offload and automate tasks, and everyone else may be paid less for what they do. That disruption is expected through the 2030s.
Why did the Luddites smash machines?
The Luddites were English textile workers who, in 1811 and 1812, broke weaving and knitting machines in Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, and Lancashire. Their main complaints were falling wages and the use of machines to replace skilled work. The name comes from Ned Ludd, a figure of legend whom the protesters claimed as their leader. In 1812 Parliament made machine breaking punishable by death.
How did the assembly line change car prices?
Ford introduced a moving assembly line at its Highland Park plant in 1913. The time to build a Model T chassis fell from more than 12 hours to about an hour and a half. The price of a Model T dropped from $850 when it launched in 1908 to under $300 by the mid-1920s. Annual Ford production passed one million cars by 1921.
Why does automation hit tasks before whole jobs?
Most jobs bundle many different tasks, and machines usually take over only some of them. Economists David Autor and Daron Acemoglu built a task-based framework around this idea. Economist James Bessen found that the number of US bank tellers rose between 1980 and 2010 even as ATMs spread. ATMs made branches cheaper to run, so banks opened more of them, and tellers spent more time on customer relationships.
More from Freakonomics Radio Network
