Jeremy Osterhouse

Many people would like to analyse which jobs, companies and industries are most exposed to AI, and assign scores, build charts, and map that against the progress of LLMs. I think this is mostly impossible: you don’t know how the jobs will change, you don’t know what else will change around this, and you can’t measure work like that anyway.

The simplest way to see the problem is to back-test this against other big technology shifts in the past. Some of the industries that should have suffered most ended up much bigger, and some of the industries that did suffer most should have been immune.

50 years of financial automation doesn’t seem to have hurt the market for CPAs.

— Benedict Evans, Predicting AI job exposure

On a walk recently, my kids found an LED display sign and discovered on close inspection that they could see individual colored lights up close, while it looked like colors from a distance. They asked me how this worked and I explained that different combinations of red, green, and blue lights could make any color. It was an abstract idea to explain to them, so it occurred to me that I could make a little web page to demonstrate how it works. I prompted Claude:

My kids have discovered that screen combine red, green, and blue to make all other colors. Could you make an html page that demonstrates mixing those three colors? Have a slider for each color that shows the color that’s being added as well as the output color.

And the result is RGB Color mixer.

[CEO] — synthesized: “A good assessment, but I don’t see the problems you describe. I see the problems I can see. You should focus on the problems I can see.”

A front-line manager’s job is to take the time to understand and adapt to the current situation. For a new senior leader, you are the situation. Chances are, your boss and your senior peers are in the middle of it. They are smack dab in the center of the chaos, and while their perspective is relevant, it’s blurred by history and chaos. One of your immense fading advantages as the new senior leader at the table is that you have no history in this current chaos, yet. You have fresh perspective that has not been beaten into submission by the chaos.

— Rands in Repose, Here’s The Rub: We Don’t Believe You