Beyond that, let\u2019s add to the Marcus Chen portfolio. Let\u2019s talk about Stacey Smith, a hypothetical health insurance claims adjuster. She and millions of people like her are employed in the U.S. in insurance and banking because of regulatory reasons that those jobs could not be off-shored. But now a lot of those approvals, whether it\u2019s mortgage underwriting or claims adjusting, are easily done by A.I. agents \u2014 more consistently, more easily able to detect fraud, much more cheaply. What\u2019s going to happen to the Stacey Smiths who are making a decent wage in places like Kentucky and Mississippi?<\/p>\n
What about Bob Johnson? Let\u2019s talk about him. He is a long-distance truck driver. He is one of three and a half million truck drivers in the U.S. who again make a decent wage. They live in the South, they live in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi. They are the breadwinners for their family. They\u2019re the pillars of their community. What happens when the Waymo technology diffuses and we get past regulatory barriers to the Bob Johnsons?<\/p>\n
So maybe Marcus has a great outcome. What about Stacey? What about Bob?<\/p>\n
BALL: <\/strong>I think if we want to get into specific industries or roles, the obvious ones are consulting, marketing, customer service, entry-level legal work, administrative work. All that is definitely real.<\/p>\n And then there\u2019s this fuzzy layer of things in the physical world. I\u2019m kind of doubtful that a humanoid robot\u2019s going to be making you a cocktail at a bar, even if it could, right? People don\u2019t want that. And that\u2019s a very important thing for thinking about the future of work. What are people\u2019s preferences going to be? Similarly, a lot of knowledge work, in the end, especially as you move up the ranks, comes down to persuading people of things. I find myself skeptical that the process of internal politicking within a firm or another organization is just going to be automated away by A.I.<\/p>\n