Speed = Death?

Angst over AI is widespread, at least among early career white collar workers. Others pooh-pooh the worries, noting that lots of jobs have gone away in the past and this is no different. Oddly, a relevant example exists in the deep biological history of Earth.

At one point about 40 years ago, many paleontologists made a strong case that changing climates had no impact on extinctions. So in the Cenozoic, the end of the Paleocene was not at a big inflection in climate, which continued to warm well into the Eocene. The cooling from the Eocene through the Oligocene seemed just a part of a longer cooling that would lead eventually to the Ice Ages. And in a sense, these paleontologists were right: it wasn’t these long gradual shifts in climate driving species to extinction. But they were also wrong, because at least in a number of the extinction episodes that define the epochs and periods of the geologic record, it really was the climate. It was just that what the climate was doing was hidden by the blurriness of the geologic record as first read.

The most dramatic example is what we now call the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM), which was originally not identified to be on that boundary between Eocene and Paleocene. It took high-resolution examination of oceanic sediments and very carefully work with terrestrial sedimentary rocks to discern a very rapid change in the Earth’s climate. And that very rapid change–most clearly evident as a rapid increase in temperature–led to a notable number of extinctions, in fact the extinctions that had caused paleontologists to define a boundary where a number of species went away [that is where those funny names originated].

The harder you look, the more it seems that it isn’t absolute levels of change, it is the rate of change that causes species to go extinct. The bolide impact at the end of the Cretaceous would have been such a rapid change that it would have been a surprise if it hadn’t caused a mass extinction. [It is worth noting that a lot of other impacts have not had remotely as profound an effect, probably a combination of smaller size and a chemically less damaging target].

Now we usually bring this up in talking about climate change, because the rapidity of climate change today will drive extinctions even beyond the ones caused by us hunting or paving or polluting the world. But the same logic applies to just how extinction of jobs is likely to evolve. Back when electricity led to the illumination of the world with light bulbs, the penetration of electricity was slow enough that those engaged in creating whale oil for lamps still had jobs for many years. Similarly the blacksmiths of the late 19th century were slowly replaced by both railroads and automobiles. These changes took decades, and many participants had skills that could migrate to other jobs.

When you look more recently, you can get a sense of trouble. The furniture and fabric manufacturers in the southeastern US were pretty successful for a long time. GG recalls a family trip where we stopped somewhere in the Carolinas to buy cheap sheets that were seconds from the local manufacturer. But when China was accorded access to the international trade system, these US companies were wiped out in short order. Both because of the concentration of specialists in this smaller area and the rapid influx of cheaper items from overseas, a lot of folks lost jobs in short order, and many of these towns are still struggling to recover. [You might think coal a similar story, but there the big story is the mechanization of coal mining far more than the replacement of coal by gas and renewables].

So what? We now have extraordinary claims that large swaths of office work will be run by AI in the next 12-15 months. Now, maybe that won’t happen, but if it does, it will mean a massive reorganization of work in very short order, and that is the recipe for extinction of a sort. Roughly half of all workers are in white-collar jobs. If this occurs over the next couple of decades, it will barely make a ripple as people move through different parts of the system in their careers. But if we are talking a year or two when entire career paths are eliminated…well, the dinosaurs wish you well…