by Mish Shedlock, Mish Talk:

Wall Street Journal writer Christopher Mims tried using AI to replace himself. He claims we are entering the “Cognitive Revolution” that will displace millions of workers.

Christopher Mims says AI will automate tasks done by hundreds of millions of workers. Please consider his article I Tried Using AI to Replace Myself

For the past two weeks, I’ve used cutting-edge artificial-intelligence tools in every aspect of my day-to-day existence, from my job to my personal life. Here’s my verdict: The last time I had an experience this eye-opening and transformative was after I bought my first smartphone.

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In experimenting with AI, my aim was to get a handle on the impact it will have on the 100 million “knowledge workers” in the U.S.—not to mention 900 million elsewhere in the world. That commitment included the research and writing of this column, which, for better or worse, would likely have taken a significantly different form without the help of AI. I didn’t use AI to write any of the words you’re reading now, but it did shape my thinking.

After talking to some of the best (human) thinkers about the potential impact of AI on knowledge work, I’m convinced that we are now entering a new kind of industrial revolution, which many have begun calling the “Cognitive Revolution.”

This nascent Cognitive Revolution—the automation of knowledge work—has important parallels to the early Industrial Revolution, when physical labor was automated. Those parallels could include higher overall productivity, and an increase in the world’s total wealth.

I’ve been using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini and Nomi’s and Perplexity’s eponymous AIs. I’ve also come to rely on AI features within other programs, such as meeting transcription and summarization in Otter, and autocomplete in Google Docs, which has sped up my note-taking.

The best of these AIs—the ones you have to pay to access—are good advisers for tasks humans have done a million times before and written about ad nauseam on the internet. Asking GPT 4 for help with an ingredient substitution or advice on a simple weeknight recipe yields good results, and on numerous occasions saved me a lot of googling. It was equally capable of creating a marketing plan for a friend’s small business.

Now that today’s generative AIs are “multimodal”—that is, they can take in and produce different kinds of media, including text and images—they can also perform tasks that are more visual. To illustrate this, I spent about 5 minutes using a custom GPT in OpenAI’s “GPT Store” (think of Apple’s App Store, but for AIs) to generate a logo for an imaginary lifestyle brand. (If you read this and are inspired to create a clothing brand for middle-aged men called “Dad Life” with the tagline “Take My Pills / Pay My Bills,” you owe me money.)

Today’s AI almost always automates individual tasks, not whole jobs. Some jobs consist mostly of tasks that can be automated, like customer service, content marketing and writing product listings for e-commerce services. There still has to be a person using and coordinating all those AIs, however, along with doing the abstract thinking that, for now, remains the sole domain of humans. This means that while AI isn’t going to eliminate jobs, people using AI will—which has been the pattern in automation since its earliest days.

Daron Acemoglu, an economist at MIT, warns that the result could be a significant replacement of workers with automation. The problem is that AI and other forms of automation are often used by companies primarily to reduce their head counts, rather than to make existing employees more productive, in part because machines are easier to manage than people.

“I think the danger is that you’re going to create a lot of inequalities between capital and labor, and between different types of labor,” says Acemoglu. Acemoglu’s warning was one reason I created my own AI assistant. The most jaw-dropping and, if I’m being honest, frightening thing it’s done so far? The first time I clicked on the button marked “Suggest a topic for this week’s column,” the results it spat out were something I already had on my list of future pieces to research.

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