1. What's the future of AI employees (or interns)?

So far from what I can gather, the concept of "AI employees" or "agents" are simply a series of prompts and functions daisy-chained to perform tasks. There's not much fundamental difference between an "agent" and an "app", other than there being some AI models under the hood. You still need a human to drive the agent, they aren't off performing tasks without being instructed or configured to do so. The current paradigm very much complements human workers who are leads, generalists, managers etc and technical enough to know how to drive them. So I don't think these higher level jobs are impacted negatively as much immediately with the current tech, if anything they are slightly more productive (note this is Nov 2024, I'm not saying this can't change, but this is the current state).

Will the entry-level jobs be impacted? Most likely they are already, anecdotally as a generalist I can perform a lot more tasks than I could a few years ago because of language models. I no longer need to hire junior developers to create prototypes and scripts, I can create them myself. Similarly, I don't need to hire copywriters to create documentation or marketing material. I've also started leveraging image generation models for basic things like landing pages, so I don't need photographers or stock image sites anymore for those tasks. I have meeting assistant "agents" taking notes and action items, I don't need an admin assistant at meetings. There is definitely a shift happening at this level, right now.

Thanks for your replies. They help. Before I worked in the internet industry, my ex and I had a bakery. We were a small business and worked every day, but couldn't afford to hire others or do other things. We would love to have an AI employee to do a lot of the work.

There are already automated products, like categorizing supplier lists, automated calculations, and collecting and organizing negative customer reviews.

Some of these dreams have now been realized. I will keep trying to help my former self—to eliminate the AI Gap for small businesses!

Interesting question about AI and jobs! Thanks for starting this discussion. AI may affect different types of jobs in different ways. I look forward to seeing insights on this.

1. AI will increase productivity. Many simple workers' jobs will be lost. 2. Automated workflows are the best use of AI. Employees should follow established processes for documents like invoices. Or send it to a client?

I'm always optimistic.

AI won't replace any specific workers. At best it will make workers more productive, say by 5%, which will at a big scale remove 5% of jobs.

Yes, that's why I said I'm hopeful and optimistic about AI + automated workflows

AI is just google searching on steroids. We'll still be needed.