Transcript
A (0:00)
Welcome to Thoughts in the Market and to part two of our conversation on AI adoption. I'm Katie Huberty, Morgan Stanley's global head of Research. Once again, I'm joined by Stephen Bird, global head of Thematic research, and Jeff McMillan, Morgan Stanley's head of firmwide AI. Today, let's focus on the human level, what this paradigm shift means for individual workers. It's Wednesday, November 5th at 10:00am in New York. Stephen, there's a lot of simultaneous fear and excitement around widespread AI adoption. There's obviously concern that AI could lead to massive job losses. But you seem optimistic about this paradigm shift. Why is that?
B (0:43)
Yeah, as I mentioned in part one, this is the most popular discussion topic with my children. I would say younger folks are quite concerned about this. There's a lot of angst among young folks thinking about what is that job market really going to look like for, for them? And admittedly, AI could be quite disruptive. So we don't want to sugarcoat that there's clearly going to be impacts across many jobs. Our work showed that around 90% of jobs will be impacted in some way. In the long term, I would guess nearly every job will be impacted in some way. The reason we are more optimistic is that what we see is a range of what we would think of as augmentation, where AI can essentially help you do something much better, explore, it can help you expand your capabilities and it will result in entirely new jobs. Now, with any new technology, it's always hard to predict exactly what those new jobs are. But examples that I see in my world of energy would be smart grid analysis, predictive maintenance, managing systems in a much more efficient way. Systems that are so complicated that they're really beyond the capability of humans to manage very effectively. So I'm quite excited there. I'm extremely excited in the life sciences where we could see entire new approaches to curing some of the worst diseases plaguing humankind. So I am really very excited in terms of those new areas of job creation. In terms of job losses. One interesting analysis that a lot of investors really focused on, that we included in our Future of Work report was the ratio within a job of augmentation to automation. The lower the ratio, the higher the risk of job loss, in the sense that that shows a sign that more of what AI is going to do is going to replace that type of human work. Examples of that would be in professional services. As I mentioned, one of my former professions, law would be an example of an area where you could see this. But essentially tasks that don't require a lot of proprietary data, require less creativity. Those are the types of tasks that are more likely to be automated.
A (2:40)
One theme I hear both in Silicon Valley and in our industry is the value of domain expertise goes up. So the lawyer that's very good in the courtroom or handling a really complicated situation because they have decades of experience, the value of that labor and talent goes up. And so when my friends ask me what their kids should pursue in school and as a career, I tell them it's less about what job they pursue. Pick a passion and become a domain expert really quickly.
