We are in the age of Artificial Intelligence. Andrew Yang ran for President of the United States in 2020 on a platform based on an AI future. We hear everything from "the sky is falling - we will all be out of work" to "that's the same thing they said when Ford perfected the assembly line". So, what's different about AI?

Let's talk about what AI can do TODAY. Today we can identify a face in a picture (That is a face), then compare that to a database of faces we know (face matching), resolve that to a data-set (name, where seen) and know a whole lot about any person we can see with a camera; this is the end of privacy. I do not require access to law enforcement resources to know a tremendous amount about you, there are plenty of available data sources and companies that sell their data to private persons or companies. Then there is self driving cars. This has the ability to disrupt an enormous number of jobs and change the economy.

Self driving cars are not just your car parked in your garage that drives you into the office and parks itself in the parking lot. This has the ability to change your relationship with travel completely. You can own a car and keep it in your garage at night. When you get up it is already prepared for the drive, the climate control is set and the entertainment system has your preferred podcast queued up for your commute to work. You are driven to work while you read the news, read a book, make calls or work on your laptop (or even take a nap). Once you arrive your car does not park, instead it is placed into "service mode" and is now available to the Uber and Lyft network to serve as an automated taxi. While you are at work your car is making you money. Finally, it returns to the office to pick you up and deliver you home at the appointed time, being connected to charge over night. With that being how your car is managed, do you want to own a car, or just use the Uber/Lyft networks to be picked up by and automated vehicle in the morning and drop you off at night?

Self driving cars are not the main area where self driving vehicles will change the landscape. Self driving trucks are the main place where this will be a change. Changing heavy trucks (18-wheeler) to autonomous vehicles is the most likely first place for AI driving. Why? Risk and cost reduction. Putting a truck with a trailer on the freeway and using a computer to drive it is an easier problem to solve than a vehicle that has to manage the chaos of city traffic. Attach a trailer and drive on the freeway. Manage one direction of traffic, at high speed for long distances. No more rest stops, only stopping for fuel and back on the road. The main challenge (technology challenge) is managing the transition to city driving, which is one of the reasons Amazon is building so many of their warehouses in less populated areas directly off the freeway - to be able to retrofit self driving logistics with the least amount of change.

So, what is the impact to all of this? In the US alone there are 3.5 million long haul truckers. Even if we don't take into consideration the support roles (8 million total) those three and a half million jobs being lost is a huge economic impact. That is 2.7% employment all at once. To make it worse, this is a technical job that requires training and certification which also allows for flexibility to where the driver lives, has low interaction (no real need for people skills) and all of those people would need to be re-trained to re-enter the workforce at a comparable income.

Let's look at the passenger car market changes and their impact to the economy. Taxi drivers would be replaced (including those who drive for Uber and Lyft). What about parking, much less needed in an automated car world? Seattle alone has 40% of the city as parking space. New York city has 1.9 million parking spots and Philadelphia has more than 2 million parking spots, or 3.7 per household. Those are very dense cities, what about a town like Jackson, WY (27.1/household) or Des Moines (19.4/household)? The majority of that space would go away, along with the jobs and tax revenue (the good news is real estate is never without value). What about the parking ticket revenue for cities? A research study revealed that the revenue was $1.4 BILLION was generated from just 16 major cities. If we all change our relationship with cars, how many of the 2 million people working in car sales will be needed if most car sales are fleet sales? We can estimate that the total job losses from automated driving will be somewhere in the 5-8 million range, or 3-5% of total US jobs.

Okay, but you are a highly trained, degreed expert. It will be forever before AI affects my job? Well, don't be so sure. What can we do today? We can use a robot lawyer today to dispute parking tickets, create and file lawsuits, research legal rulings and even legal services related to asylum applications or housing for the homeless. We are about to use AI to write contracts, or analyze existing contracts as well. Not a lawyer, how about medicine? Artificial Intelligence can already recognize an embolism, find brain bleeds, identify cancer all before a specialist can. Or how about an anesthesiologist? One of the riskiest parts of a medical procedure, AI already has a lower failure rate in simulation than the specialist, the same one with a $250,000 degree who is in the top 2% of jobs. And AI can do a far better job.

Well, at least the creatives are safe.... You would think so, but AI is writing books (they are not any good yet), music (like pots and pans being thrown down stairs), but it is improving at the same rate as a music student does. That means it will be a very different space in 15-20 years. We were talking about today? Have you heard about deep fakes? Deep fake has the potential to replace an actor in a film with any actor that has been in film before, completely digitally. We can use their voice and face to add them to any film. To make it even more scary - they do not need to be alive for it to work. Do you want to see Al Pacino, Robert Di Nero and Donald Sutherland in a new film, all in their prime? We are close to being able to do that today. Untouchables 2 could be a click away..... Shudder...

There is one more thing I want to talk about before signing off and letting you go fix a drink. That is the title of this article, the death of expertise.

Think about how you got started on your path to becoming an expert. You started with simple, repeatable tasks that taught you the language of the work, and how the pieces fit together in a way that reduced the risk of mistakes, since you were likely to make them in your first years. Then there was the work that had some more depth and involved some limited decision making, and maybe linked together two to five of those initial simple tasks and added nuance and a clearer picture to the business you were in. Finally you started influencing the policies and workflows that were used to make them more efficient. Before long people came to you for your expertise and you were mentoring one or more people who were where you had been. Now AI has replaced all of those things you used to evolve into the expert you are today. AI is not to the point where it can make the complex decisions you are paid expert level wages to do today. So now you are in the position of being the last expert. AI will remove the tier 1 learning, followed soon by tier 2 tasks removing the ability to grow and evolve to become an expert. Making you the last and final generation of experts..... To me that is the saddest result of all.

So what do we do? We must look at the societal impact of AI, how will it change the landscape of what we consider reality to be. We have always held the position of the thinking organism, but with AI we have competition. Use your voice, make sure your company is thinking about the big picture. Make sure your government representatives understand the complexity of the issue and the societal impact to that power moving almost completely to the corporation (some tax law changes should be considered now, before it is too late....)

All in all the benefits will be incredible and I look forward to what the future holds for us.