There are lots of predictions on how AI can cause massive job losses, but some people believe that they could also change how regular employees work in a more positive way.
Scale AI CEO Alexdandr Wang has said that AI will cause everyone to be promoted to become a ‘manager’. Employees will need to manage a team of AI agents, which will do the tasks they were earlier doing. This could greatly improve the productivity of each employee.
“ Instead of my job being like, hey, I have to do the work — I have to literally do the work on a laptop — it’ll almost be like everybody gets promoted to being a manager,” he said in an interview. “Because I’m going to be managing a little pod of 10 AI agents that are doing the work that I used to do, but I need to make sure that all of them are doing it right. And that they’re not making any mistakes and if they’re making mistakes, I’m helping them get around those mistakes. Over time, everybody will just be upgraded to being a manager, or sort of promoted to being a manager,” he added.
“But can you have that many managers, do you think?” the interviewer asked him. “Yeah, because the other thing that’s going to happen is the economy is just going to grow so much,” he said.
It is a compelling argument. Most jobs are generally made of up of different discrete tasks, and it’s possible that AI agents that are trained for specific tasks will complete them. For example, a product manager needs to check out features on competitors’ websites and app, analyze data, suggest product changes, coordinate with different teams, and track progress. It’s possible that different agents could perform the bulk of work needed for these functions, and the human employee would just need to coordinate and check their work, much like a conductor at an orchestra. It remains to be seen if such a future plays out, but given how AI likely soon be able to do most functional tasks at white-collar jobs, the scenario described by Alexandr Wang does seem to be very much within the realm of possibility.