How the Internet Rewired Work - and What That Tells Us About AI's Likely Impact (msn.com)
- Reference: 0180183537
- News link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/11/23/0812238/how-the-internet-rewired-work---and-what-that-tells-us-about-ais-likely-impact
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence/how-the-internet-rewired-work-and-what-that-tells-us-about-ai-s-likely-impact/ar-AA1QXb9W
So while the number of single-task jobs like travel agent dropped, most jobs "are bundles of judgment, coordination and hands-on work," and instead the internet brought "the quiet transformation of nearly every job in the economy... Today, just 10% of workers make minimal use of the internet on the job — roles like butcher and carpet installer."
> [T]he bigger story has been additive. In 1998, few could conceive of social media — let alone 65,000 social-media managers — and 200,000 information-security analysts would have sounded absurd when data still lived on floppy disks... Marketing shifted from campaign bursts to always-on funnels and A/B testing. Clinics embedded e-prescribing and patient portals, reshaping front-office and clinical handoffs. The steps, owners and metrics shifted. Only then did the backbone scale: We went from server closets wedged next to the mop sink to data centers and cloud regions, from lone system administrators to fulfillment networks, cybersecurity and compliance.
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> That is where many unexpected jobs appeared. Networked machines and web-enabled software quietly transformed back offices as much as our on-screen lives. Similarly, as e-commerce took off, internet-enabled logistics rewired planning roles — logisticians, transportation and distribution managers — and unlocked a surge in last-mile work. The build-out didn't just hire coders; it hired coordinators, pickers, packers and drivers. It spawned hundreds of thousands of warehouse and delivery jobs — the largest pockets of internet-driven job growth, and yet few had them on their 1998 bingo card... Today, the share of workers in professional and managerial occupations has more than doubled since the dawn of the digital era.
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> So what does that tell us about AI? Our mental model often defaults to an industrial image — John Henry versus the steam drill — where jobs are one dominant task, and automation maps one-to-one: Automate the task, eliminate the job. The internet revealed a different reality: Modern roles are bundles. Technologies typically hit routine tasks first, then workflows, and only later reshape jobs, with second-order hiring around the backbone. That complexity is what made disruption slower and more subtle than anyone predicted. AI fits that pattern more than it breaks it... [LLMs] can draft briefs, summarize medical notes and answer queries. Those are tasks — important ones — but still parts of larger roles. They don't manage risk, hold accountability, reassure anxious clients or integrate messy context across teams. Expect a rebalanced division of labor: The technical layer gets faster and cheaper; the human layer shifts toward supervision, coordination, complex judgment, relationship work and exception handling.
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> What to expect from AI, then, is messy, uneven reshuffling in stages. Some roles will contract sharply — and those contractions will affect real people. But many occupations will be rewired in quieter ways. Productivity gains will unlock new demand and create work that didn't exist, alongside a build-out around data, safety, compliance and infrastructure.
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> AI is unprecedented; so was the internet. The real risk is timing: overestimating job losses, underestimating the long, quiet rewiring already under way, and overlooking the jobs created in the backbone. That was the internet's lesson. It's likely to be AI's as well.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence/how-the-internet-rewired-work-and-what-that-tells-us-about-ai-s-likely-impact/ar-AA1QXb9W
Trades are barely affected (Score:4, Interesting)
Cellphones definitely had an impact but Internet not so much. We've swapped yellow pages for a search engine. Big whoopee.
Re: Trades are barely affected (Score:1)
Somewhere around 1990, pig piles of yellow pages would be delivered in neighbour hoods and businesses all over and go straight to the garbage. It took about three years for the infernal things to die.
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Yellow pages were better than the internet, because (a) they were encyclopedic, (b) they couldn't really be gamed, and (c) it was actually easier to find businesses that way than go through all sorts of garbage returned by search engines.
Re: Trades are barely affected (Score:3, Interesting)
I hired a plumber a few years back to change out some valves and pipes that he could do with the stock out of his truck in 90 minutes that would have taken me two days of home depot runs.
After the job, he took out his tablet, typed in all the parts he used, logged his time, and had me tap my credit card. I get an email receipt, he gets paid for the job his apprentice gets his hours logged, and neither he, his boss, nor I have to think about it anymore.
This is in contrast to the guy who blows out my sprinkle
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Credit cards predate even cellphones. Having handheld devices for job management also predates the Internet. As you say, they add tech as they choose.
Re: Trades are barely affected (Score:1)
Yeah I remember the convenience of my dad handing over his credit card in the early 90s and having the clerk run it through those embosser/carbon paper things.
And I'm sure everyone over 50 who used to have a summer job at the amusement park remembers the fun of dealing with all those paper slips and only actually getting paid after the physical paperwork got reconciled.
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The line between cellphones and internet is thin, since most of what the cellphone does is...on the internet.
But the internet/cellphones have affected trades quite a bit.
- Giving directions to a work location is no longer a thing. Just an address is enough.
- Work orders are sent to workers via the internet, instead of being dispatched by radio.
- Work scheduling is often done in real time by computer, and transmitted to workers via the internet.
- Parts ordering is often done by the worker on site, using thei
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Trades are *vastly* affected by the internet, because the people fixing things refer to the internet all the time for manuals, to find parts, verify tech bulletins, not to mention booking appointments. In addition, they can take certificate courses on the internet which normally would interfere with their work hours.
No obvious parallels (Score:1)
The Internet rewrote work by making information accessible anywhere anytime. All the paperwork gone, producers and consumers, more often than not completely automated, talking to each other whenever the need arose, with the decision-maker seeing all of it all the time.
That was a real problem and a real bottleneck.
It isn't very clear what real bottlenecks does the "AI" solve. In physics, it tries to solve two problems - lazy students who can't be bothered to study and do problems, and inadequate experiment d
Re: No obvious parallels (Score:3)
All the old paper work was replaced by obtuse workflows and new paper work.
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No paper.
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I was thinking more along these lines. We used to have binders with 1000 pages in them for an OS reference. That was an obvious problem to be solved. Brick and morter stores can only have so much stock. Another obvious problem. The problems AI is solving is not so obvious.
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AI solves many white-collar problems.
- Research is simplified and more straightforward.
- Coding assistants help developers in areas where they are less familiar, like a new API or framework.
- AI is getting quite good at document analysis. For example, today's crop of AI-assisted resume readers, is quite good at pulling important information from resumes, which have no predefined structure. This pattern holds true with many kinds of documents.
- Formulating structured requirements from informal prompts.
If you
Reality (Score:4, Interesting)
Even in my lifetime, it was almost impossible to have one job that would last your entire career. Especially in technology and technology adjacent careers.
Life long learning we called it. Prepare for the next thing. Think of say, electronics from tube to transistor to IC to early to modern computing. A woman photographer who worked where I was refused to do digital photography. Or at least the impeded it at every chance. After I designed a new process of digital, she then turned her stasis seeking onto me, saying I was too secretive for her to learn. The supervisor said "I have an almost 3 inch thick stack of memos and process outline, and your name is on the distribution list." She ended up losing her job because she refused to adapt.
Point is people have a desire for stasis, somewhat understandable. But if you were a miner, the days of hundreds of men laboring underground are almost over, at least greatly diminished. In my area, the coal mining is now handled by just a few. people and at an incredible pace. If you want employment, you need to look elsewhere. AI now. It is difficult to know firmly where this is going. One thing almost certain is that the present form of AI is a huge bubble, which complicates things. But this is another shift in technology adjacent employment. So I'd be paying close attention to what develops. Best to get in on the ground floor rather than wait too long.
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Imagine the sad number of people who will be working in a datacenter the size of 20 football fields. They probably won't even be manned 24/7.
Re: Reality (Score:1)
The burned out hard drives and power supplies will replace themselves?
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That's something simple for a robot to do. Or there will be so much redundancy that someone will be able to come once a month and do all the swaps.
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> That's something simple for a robot to do. Or there will be so much redundancy that someone will be able to come once a month and do all the swaps.
Who designs and implements the robot. Your humongous datacenter will need a lot of them. Do you design datacenters that you know the implementations?
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Those people are designing robots today. The people who design robots won't go up if there are millions of robots. The whole point of robots is that they only require a handful of actual people. We have had automated tape libraries for years. A hard drive swapping robot wouldn't be that much more complex than a tape swapping robot. Maybe visual alignment gets more difficult, but if the datacenter is designed for robots first and people second then there are robots out there already doing far more advan
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I believe that data centers for quite some time have been designed to automatically deactivate failed equipment but leave it in place and not replace it. It's just cheaper than sending someone to fix it and the small decrease in performance is accounted for in the design. The entire data center has a defined life dictated by technology advances. This is usually fairly short 3 to 5 years. (AI data centers are shorter).
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> Imagine the sad number of people who will be working in a datacenter the size of 20 football fields. They probably won't even be manned 24/7.
Lot's of people are sad anyhow.
Jobs, careers. Working for a living, professionalism. There is a difference.
If you want to be a professional, there are certain aspects of your workalike you have to adapt to - or have the temperament to do The big datacenter example is not uncommon even today in different jobs. Automotive factories are humongous. They use a lot of robots, but the humans inside are just a cog in the machine. Even the engineering jobs are not all that exciting. I have a friend who interv
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People do have a desire for stasis, but that desire is overwhelmed by a desire for change. Specifically, people want things to be better, easier, more reliable, more automated.
I'm reminded of a company I worked for a decade ago, that built practice management software for doctors. Doctors are *notorious* for disliking change. Doctors would tell us about bugs in the software. When we told them that the bugs were fixed in the latest version, they would tell us they didn't want the latest version, they wanted
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> I'm reminded of a company I worked for a decade ago, that built practice management software for doctors. Doctors are *notorious* for disliking change. Doctors would tell us about bugs in the software. When we told them that the bugs were fixed in the latest version, they would tell us they didn't want the latest version, they wanted the bugs fixed in the version they had!
Medical Doctors have one big issue - they are nowhere near as smart as they think they are. 8^)
Your example reminds me of Video work. Before non-linear editing, A lot of places used the Amiga with a video Toaster board. I used one. So Lightwave had a demonstration at my university. Everyone was wowed. Then someone spoke up. This is great - we need it for the PC. The Lightwave guy said, "We don't make it for the PC, because the Amiga has many custom chips inside, The PC can't do it." Our guy said "You don
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AI will take "most" of our jobs in the same way that the internet took "most" of yesterday's jobs. In the case of the internet, there were more, better jobs than before. I suspect the same will be true of the AI revolution.
I'm not that optimistic. (Score:2)
Even if the prediction of comparatively controlled impact is accurate; I think it's worth considering just how grim it is likely to be; not in purely economic terms; but in the character of the work.
Maybe this is a personal peculiarity; but I that there's something exquisitely dispiriting about beating your head against people who are stubborn or clueless enough that every conversation is just a baffling sequence of different confusions, some of the repeated from previously. It's a totally different thin
what AI (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not saying AI isn't going to be disruptive, but I've had a long look at LLMs and they're not much more than clippy (or autocorrect) on steroids.
So there's an increase to be had with respect to the efficiency of many types of desk work and then some. Since proofreading and checking stuff will still be required, although of a different nature (not spelling errors but entire missteps and such), there's not a 100% reduction of actual desk work, perhaps 50%? But anyone doing desk work knows that producing text or code is merely a part of their job. You need to figure out what's going on and what that means for your upcoming work. LLMs are a great parlour trick but they aren't going to help much with that. Or at least, I've not seen it capable of doing that. So, big whoop, people will be more productive.
As for other AI, and their impact, sure, being it on and we'll see. For now I'm tired of the hype. Allow me to repeat myself...
On the hype about AI being oh so capable, and going to put everyone out of a job:
When the first AI company CEO lets their AI handle all their financials, I'll start paying attention to the hype. But not until the AI programmers let their AI handle all their financials will I start believing. Indeed, convince me by putting your money where your mouth is. Until then, i won't pay a lot of attention to these AI stories.
On general AI / artificial general intelligence:
I'll believe someone managed to develop full general AI when the news hits of the first company with zero employees, just shareholders / owners.
Thanks for letting me get that off my chest.
Re:what AI (Score:5, Funny)
> and they're not much more than clippy (or autocorrect) on steroids.
More like clippy on LSD if you ask me.
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I've been saying the same thing about Agile for years. If Agile is so great, why don't you want Payroll to use it?
The detail is helpful (Score:2)
When people worry about AI taking all our jobs, they *are* thinking in terms like specific jobs being automated away. They can't see what new jobs will be created, and suggesting that they will surely be created, doesn't convince or help.
This analysis of what happened with the dawn of the internet is helpful in this way. It breaks down what kinds of jobs were lost, and what new kinds of jobs were created. We need more of this kind of analysis.
was that w,ritten by AI, or is it human gibberish? (Score:4, Insightful)
I realize that the Wall Street Journal has gone downhill but, seriously. I'd ask why it got reposted here but, slashdot hasn't gone downhill so much as it hasn't ever had much height above sea level.
Re: was that w,ritten by AI, or is it human gibber (Score:1)
Most jobs in a bureaucracy are useless and not productive. In ye olden deyz there were huge offices filled with pretty girls whose sole job was to make correspondence look pretty. An engineer would write a letter by hand in his chicken scratch, send it to the typing pool and after a week, they would return a draft done by a youngster with a typo in each paragraph. You would then mark it up and it would then go to a more senior and possibly less pretty lady to retype and you would get it back with maybe on
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> Most jobs in a bureaucracy are useless and not productive.
That was DOGE's mantra. Didn't seem to work out like planned.
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Agreed.
And the entire context of the article is incorrect, along with the concept that AI is revolutionary somehow. It's only the latest iteration of mechanization advocacy through software.
No doubt certain models can ally efforts towards quality and productivity results, but these are often highly monolithic and silos, rather than your brilliant new friend. The marketing folks, however, prefer you think of AI as unerring, useful, and safe to use. It is not.
The posted article gets almost everything wrong. W
Re:was that w,ritten by AI, or is it human gibberi (Score:4, Insightful)
It was written by people who don't understand that the quoted butcher and carpet installer contribute more to society than most of the internet-tranformed jobs. Or the people who wrote the article, for that matter.
Re: was that w,ritten by AI, or is it human gibber (Score:1)
What do you contribute?
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Slashdot commentary, obviously.