Matt Turner‘s latest Insider piece states that generative AIs like ChatGPT will make less skilled workers more efficient, but it would have the greatest negative effect on mid-career, low-performing white-collar workers.

The story Matt wrote is based on talk with a high-tech exec, which is summarizes as follows. The exec told Matt: “More specifically, AI could disproportionately impact the middle class of white-collar workers — the folks who are mid-career, mid-ability, mid-level, and yes, in some cases, mediocre.”

• AI benefits the least experienced workers. Academics Erik Brynjolfsson, Lindsey R. Raymond, and Danielle Li recently studied the impact of access to an AI-based conversational assistant on almost 5,200 customer support agents at a Fortune 500 software company, and wrote in their report “In contrast to studies of prior waves of computerization, we find that these gains accrue disproportionately to less-experienced and lower-skill workers. We argue that this occurs because ML systems work by capturing and disseminating the patterns of behavior that characterize the most productive agents.”
• The middle class of knowledge workers will face their own Uber moment. Professor Carl Benedikt Frey, the director of future of work at the Oxford Martin School, likens this shift to the impact of Uber on London taxi drivers. “Suddenly, knowing the name of each street in London was no longer valuable expertise, so that anybody with a drivers license could drive a taxi. The result was more competition for incumbent taxi drivers who saw their incomes fall by around 10%.”
• If you’re worried about what AI means for your career, start using it. Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told Jacob Zinkula “Workers’ experiences may be more dependent on the nature of their firms’ adoption of these technologies. Are they adopted in a spirit of improving processes and creating more and better output? Or are they used crudely just to get rid of workers? That’s a difference between ‘good AI’ and ‘bad AI’.”

Richard Baldwin, an economist and professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland, reportedly said at a recent event, “AI won’t take your job. It’s somebody using AI that will take your job.”