If you think AI replaces software engineers, here’s a quick thought experiment. Imagine you’re a life sciences company. 10 years ago you want to invest heavily in lab automation, processing data at scale, and other software. You look at the cost of doing so and realize you can’t compete with tech for as many engineers as you need, so you pare down your goals and do what you can. Every new software project has a fixed cost of a certain sized team, so you can only do so much given budgets, ability to compete for talent, and other trade offs. Now, AI comes along. And all of a sudden you have the *exact same* output tokens as the best tech companies in the world. Your engineers are using the same AI models as the tech industry, which means you have just boosted your engineering team by a some meaningful amount, while also neutralizing your differences with tech. Do you continue with your pared down approach, or do you start to hire more engineers because each engineer is 2X or 5X more capable than before? In almost every company I’m talking to, they’re doing the latter. Now extrapolate this to every bank, manufacturer, industrial company, retailer, and on and on. And extrapolate it not to just large enterprises, but also every SMB up and down the stack of these value chains. Oh, and also extrapolate this to other job functions, not just engineers. Resource scarce domains in marketing, legal, finance, design, and so on. If you’re wondering why new jobs show up because of AI this is the reason. Any other view of what happens doesn’t contemplate the variety of unmet needs there are in the economy.
如果你认为 AI 会取代 software engineers，不妨做个简短的思想实验。假设你是一家 life sciences 公司。10 年前，你想在 lab automation、以规模化方式处理数据以及其他 software 方面进行大量投入。你评估这样做的成本后发现，你无法像 tech 行业那样招到所需数量的 engineers 来参与竞争，于是你只能下调目标，在能力范围内尽量去做。每个新的 software 项目都有一个固定成本，需要一支达到特定规模的团队，所以受限于预算、争夺人才的能力以及其他权衡，你能做的事情始终有限。现在，AI 出现了。突然之间，你拥有了与全球最优秀 tech 公司*完全相同*的 output tokens。你的 engineers 使用的是与 tech 行业相同的 AI models，这意味着你的 engineering team 在产能上得到了相当可观的提升，同时你与 tech 公司之间的差距也被抹平了。那么，你会继续维持原先那个下调后的方案，还是会开始招聘更多 engineers，因为现在每位 engineer 的能力都变成了过去的 2X 或 5X？几乎我接触到的每一家公司，选择的都是后者。现在，把这个逻辑外推到每一家 bank、manufacturer、industrial company、retailer，等等。再把它外推到不仅仅是大型 enterprise，还包括这些价值链上下游的每一家 SMB。哦，对了，还要把它外推到其他 job functions，而不只是 engineers。那些资源稀缺的领域，比如 marketing、legal、finance、design 等等。如果你在想，为什么 AI 会催生新的 jobs，原因就在这里。任何其他关于未来会如何发展的看法，都没有充分考虑到经济中存在着多少尚未被满足的需求。