Labor markets were strong for long periods of the off shoring process, but countless people were displaced, many of whom didn’t have the ability to retrain to equivalently paid jobs. My comment upthread details that aspect of things.
Also offshoring was absolutely driven by technological advances. Commercial grade network speeds made some of it possible, and even more of it simply more convenient, cheaper, and w/ less friction than it would have taken earlier.
As one small example one of my projects at my first job out of college was for a small publishing company. It was a jack-of-all trades job but this project had me working on digitizing the back catalog. They had decades of prior publications, books, journals that were print-only. They paid significant (comparatively) fees to get the most in demand of the back catalog’s abstracts transcribed by a US firm, and even more money for whole articles or books that were really popular. However advances in the speed of scanning technology and OCR accuracy meant that costs went down. In particular better tools for things like human-assisted OCR meant that we could offshore the scanning of the entire back catalog to a firm in India where those tools could be used by people with less domain knowledge and non-native fluency in English to achieve similar results. I oversaw coordinating the technical details of the deal, implementing parts of the in house database for the results, and the integration with the digital platforms of the day.
None of that was impossible with prior tech, but tech advances both lowered the cost and friction of doing it from half a world away.
Separately you can look at advances is shipping & logistics technology, some even decades prior to the digital revolution, that made offshoring of manufacturing a viable economic option. Just one part of that was containerized shipping & its massive growth in the 60’s and 70’s paving the way for significant globalization >= the 80’s. All of that required technical advances.
I think we are passing each other by in addressing different core points. (which i'll specify more clearly below, I may not have done so as explicitly as I thought)
I am not arguing with a claim that AI will forever result in a net-negative of jobs. I'm not certain how this will play out, but you & I probably agree (my apologies if I read too much into your comment) that things will likely, as with past technological disruptions, level out, new different jobs created, likely no need for long term anxiety or panic on a macroscopic level. Going back to the publishing company I worked for, innovations going on elsewhere in the field meant that costs for publications, and even very high quality publications, dropped so significantly that lots of places that couldn't previously afford such things could now do so. More publishing meant more jobs for designers, copywriters, marketing folks to determine their strategic use, etc... lots and lots of new jobs.
On to what I intended as my main point: I was addressing the claim by the article's authors that worrying about this process amounted to moral panic, forgetting the history of past innovations, etc. I strongly disagree. The changes to required skills will mean that not everyone qualified for the old jobs will easily transition to new ones. Some never will, and a portion of those won't do so because it's not a realistic possibility for them [1]. I saw the publishing revolution evolve over more than a decade. It came for different jobs at different time. The people in the pathway of that have plenty of reason be anxious or panic a bit about the-- at minimum-- upheaval of their lives or if they're really unfortunate lasting economic difficulties.
[1] This is for (at least) two main reasons:
1) Age. Plenty of people in the twilight of their working years may be able to reskill and find other jobs, but plenty won't. Maybe some won't have the aptitude for it, some won't have the economic ability to take time off from receiving a paycheck to do so, and so on. And even if they do, they're starting off fresh in a new line of work without job experience in it, so they're at the bottom of the pay ladder, entry level work. Ageism is also a thing. A 62 year old person with 40 decades of pre-digital expertise typesetting & related skills loses their job. They spend 6 months or longer paying to learn new skills in digital equivalents. They try to get a job and they are A) competing against a mass of younger people that are "native" to this technology and B) having their resumes reviewed by people that see a candidate with little direct experience in the required tech who might very well be quitting into retirement just as they're starting to become most useful after learning the job.
2) Hindsight is 20/20. It's easy to look back at these shifts and say "well they should have seen the way the industry was moving and made changes earlier". But that ignores the fact that such dramatic shifts are often not obvious in the moment. At the very beginning of such things-- even before hand when the tech is invented but not adopted-- there will be people saying "X is dying!". And then for years people hear that message while very little changes By the time a decent fraction of things have shifted enough that maybe the future is a little clearer people have also heard "X is dying!" for so long that it's just noise and they become hardened against the message. Some will manage, some won't, some will get trapped in the "age" scenario I detailed.
In short: Society probably doesn't need to panic about this, especially when taking a long term view. But individual industries and people in specific types of jobs are, contrary to the general point by the article's author, quite justified in having a little bit of "OMG we're f'ed!". In fact it is exactly those people doing that right now who will-- by virtue of their fear and panic-- be most likely to take steps early in these shifts to reposition themselves either by business pivot or job skills to weather the change.
If you're a copywriter in advertising & marketing right now and you feel comfortable, if you're going about your daily work and you're not panicking at least a little bit, that's a problem. LLM's may only (right now) turn out mediocre results so those sorts of tasks but lets face it: A majority of ads, marketing, and other writing churned out by humans today is also mediocre and uninspired. The people in those fields that are quite reasonable panicking right now are the ones who will either A) Improve their throughput productivity to be one of the few remaining workers churning out a larger amount of the same mediocre work or B) Using the output of these new tools to bootstrap the process of generating a bunch of mediocre options and then using human-level intelligence to sort through the results and polish on up into something much better than mediocre.
The thing about advertising and marketing is that actually writing copy doesn't take anywhere near the full 40 hours a week. How much time does it take to type up a short bit of marketing copy? If your only goal is to just shit something, anything out then you could write up a whole campaign in a few minutes.
But they don't do that in general. So where's ChatGPT going to save time? You'll still have to iterate, iterate, iterate, go back to stakeholders, discuss in progress work with clients, etc etc etc. I just don't see any reason to worry much in the short term, as long as you're working for a reputable company.
This may change eventually, but I foresee it taking several years at least. Progress isn't anywhere near as "exponential" as some camps claim.
Don't focus exclusively on the specific example I chose. It's only one area of applicability and tech is still advancing rapidly such that improvements will likely make it useful for new use cases as time goes on.
But even staying on just this one example, your framing of the process is incorrect:
You are underestimating the amount of "creative" time that goes on in these processes, and how the labor is divided. There are in fact full time creative folks who spend much closer to 40 hours a week on this than you think. I've worked on the analytics side of a few campaigns from small to very large (not my favorite type of project) so I've sat in on plenty of meetings where my organization was the customer. During the entire process, before we even sit down with a marketing firm, people on my side were spending significant time brainstorming ideas, slogans, narrative tone, visual aesthetic etc. so we could have a starting point for conversation.
When that conversation began, it was account managers from the marketing firm, not creative staff involved. Account managers met with the client, discussed & clarified ideas, refined the parameters of what we wanted, etc. Then they took it back to their dedicated creative staff who did spend a majority of their time working on the actual creative side. We generally only spoke at length to someone like a full-time writer for very important projects, and their time was billed by the hour, usually scoped out as a block of time in the contract. Otherwise we might have only a brief conversation, usually if a few rounds of conversation & revisions hadn't quite got us where we needed. Sure there's bleed over and in any given company people will wear multiple hats and the venn diagram of account manage & creative will have more or less overlap, but beyond small firms this is a typical rough picture on the division of labor.
>I just don't see any reason to worry much in the short term
Depends on what you mean. If you mean "Don't panic that you're going to lose your job in a year" then I'd guess you're mostly right. If you mean "Don't worry at all" then you're mostly wrong, because as you specified, "short term". And as I said in my last comment, if people in jobs exposed to disruption aren't worried right now, then they are the ones most at risk of getting left behind. The people who worry now will be more likely to prepare.
> your only goal is to just shit something, anything out... [and later] ...as long as you're working for a reputable company.
See my previous comment about 90% of this output being fairly bland and mediocre, but the process still isn't to choose the first idea you think of, which is likely not going to be the best one compared to taking more time to come up with a bunch and choose from the best. There are lots of levels of mediocrity, and the first thing you shit out is simply the lowest of them. In reality the typical process will be something like this:
Forget about longer copy writing, let's choose something smaller, a slogan. Usually 1 sentence, sometimes 2, but not much longer. I, the customer, go to a marketing firm for an entire campaign, one part of which is the slogan. As part of the contract we will have 2-3 rounds of discussions, preliminary ideas, revisions, etc, and the "deliverable" will be 3 finished, polished options to choose from. The account manager isn't going to their writer and saying "give me 3 slogans". They're saying "Give me 10 slogans to start with". The writer then goes to work. The writer does not write 10 slogans! The write writes more like 20 or 30, maybe more if you count minor iterations. They choose the 10 best and bring it to the account manager, talk them over, then the copywriter goes back and revises and maybe writes a bunch more for the account manager to finally choose the half dozen they think the client will like the most. The client gives feedback, the account manager goes back to the copywriter, who goes back for another round, etc. If all goes well then after 2 or 3 rounds of this the account manager has a final meeting with the client for approval of one of the 3 final options. And that's just for the slogan
My point is that I don't understand what using an LLM changes here. You'll still have to generate multiple candidate slogans, you'll still have to bring 10 of them to the account manager, you'll still have to discuss the possibilities with the customer and tailor the results to their needs. You'll still have to iterate. All an LLM can do is write the candidate slogans, and -- as of now -- it doesn't do a spectacularly great job at it. Very little actual labor is being saved here.
I'm sorry but I see no relation between saying "some people will fare better then others in society" and "technical advances grow the economic output". Personal success and overall societal progress are completely independent processes. Some people will advance in degenerating societies. Some people will loose out during golden ages. I really don't see a point to be made here.
Also offshoring was absolutely driven by technological advances. Commercial grade network speeds made some of it possible, and even more of it simply more convenient, cheaper, and w/ less friction than it would have taken earlier.
As one small example one of my projects at my first job out of college was for a small publishing company. It was a jack-of-all trades job but this project had me working on digitizing the back catalog. They had decades of prior publications, books, journals that were print-only. They paid significant (comparatively) fees to get the most in demand of the back catalog’s abstracts transcribed by a US firm, and even more money for whole articles or books that were really popular. However advances in the speed of scanning technology and OCR accuracy meant that costs went down. In particular better tools for things like human-assisted OCR meant that we could offshore the scanning of the entire back catalog to a firm in India where those tools could be used by people with less domain knowledge and non-native fluency in English to achieve similar results. I oversaw coordinating the technical details of the deal, implementing parts of the in house database for the results, and the integration with the digital platforms of the day.
None of that was impossible with prior tech, but tech advances both lowered the cost and friction of doing it from half a world away.
Separately you can look at advances is shipping & logistics technology, some even decades prior to the digital revolution, that made offshoring of manufacturing a viable economic option. Just one part of that was containerized shipping & its massive growth in the 60’s and 70’s paving the way for significant globalization >= the 80’s. All of that required technical advances.