Reimagining Work Through Human Capability

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I'm Henry Blodgett, and this week on Solutions, I talk to Professor Moloch about how he's radically transformed how he teaches. and how he continues to test the boundaries of what AI can and cannot do. Follow Solutions with Henry Blodgett to hear our conversation. Welcome to a Prop G on the Future of Work in AI, a special two part series on who wins, who loses, and how AI will reshape the labor market. We're joined by Anish Raman, Chief Economic Opportunity Officer at LinkedIn. Together we'll be answering your questions on what AI means for workers, which jobs are most at risk. And where the biggest opportunities lie. Anyways, let's bust right into it. Anish, you ready? I'm ready. Let's do it. Question number one. Our first question comes from Oh a Day Ten on Reddit. And they say, Can you discuss the future for a forty to sixty year old with a family and bills dealing with age discrimination and young people from each side when AI comes for sixty percent of existing white collar jobs. Nish. You kick us off. Yeah, I well first um Everyone's feeling a lot of stress right now, a lot of anxiety right now. I'm grateful for the question because that's my peer group and I think all the conversations we've been having about entry level work and what should new grads uh think about is Anna really tough. hiring market, um, can make folks in that age group feel like, oh This is change that's gonna hit those coming into the labor market. We're sort of at this place where we're gonna ride out the work we've done. Uh, it's not common for us. It's common for all of us. Uh work is not ending. That's the good news. But the the hard truth is work is work is gonna change for everyone. in some fundamental ways. And I think the most important thing that people who are mid into their career or even later in their career can just sort of realize, if not embrace, is you're gonna have to reinvent yourself a bit. Old math isn't gonna work for the new equations coming to work. You're gonna have to start over a bit, redefine yourself, learn again, push yourself, get uncomfortable. Um, it's gonna be like you're re-entering the labor market. Now. The simplest way to do that. is forget about your job title. I have a career. Scott just gave me by my title. Uh it got made up a year ago by our CEO. Like my career makes absolutely no sense by job title. I was a war correspondent speech writer to President Obama, did growth at startups, uh was doing economic impact at companies, and then with the California governor, now I'm at LinkedIn and a made up job title. The old way of work really was hard for me sometimes. I'd go in interviews. They'd say, Oh, that's interesting, but where do you fit? What slot are you in this org chart. And I could never fit myself into the org chart. And so that would always be this red flag for folks. And it made it harder for me to get a job later in my career. Well, now I can tell you what I do based on skills. I I try to do explanatory storytelling as best I can. That's been across my career. I try to build coalitions around stories that I think matter and that we gotta do something about. And for me that's all about economic opportunity now. So now no matter what changes about my job, I know what I uniquely do. That's what everyone's gotta do. Put all your job titles aside, the ones that you've had, the ones that you have, especially mid career. Think about the job you're in as a set of tasks. Last week you did about a dozen tasks that mattered. Start to think about where those tasks fit in a bucketing. The first bucket is what AI can do. Hey, I can do a lot of quick analysis, quick research, first drafts, coding. If you're not sure what goes in AI and folks in this age range are falling behind in terms of AI adoption and awareness, like that's issue number one for you. You gotta be using these tools, using them in new ways, using new tools in new ways. If you just think this one tool that's a better search is AI, that's not it. So bucket one is really start to understand what AI is coming for in your job. By the tasks you do. Bucket two is what are you doing with AI to like up level your your work and yourself? What are you learning in new and interesting ways? What are you creating? in new and interesting ways. Make sure you're filling that bucket more and more over time. And then bucket three is what are you doing with other people that's new and exciting? I mean, where work is going is not a single person. with a bunch of AI tools doing big things. It's a bunch of people with a bunch of AI tools doing big new things. Look at your job. Look at that spread. And be honest with yourself. If you're heavy in that bucket one. You gotta start thinking about where your career's no going next and what are the the tasks in bucket two and three you can start to build from. Don't worry about your job title. Don't worry about your function. What are sort of adjacencies you can start to go into? I'm in sales, but I think I'm really good at this marketing part of what they do around sales. How do you grow into that and not worry about just doing your boss's job? Um so you've got to lean into it. I know it's stressful. And I know that everyone feels like they're not getting enough help. I don't think that leaders across sectors are doing enough to engage workers to help people understand what's coming, but don't worry about all that if you can. Just start with what you can control, which is an honest accounting of your job. an honest accounting of where I'm coming for tasks and then a real growth mindset about how you're going to build on on areas that AI isn't coming for. So a lot there. First off on the question, I'm not sure by that forty to sixty percent of jobs are gonna go Away with AI. And Forty to sixty is um In some ways Some ways a good spot and and in other ways sort of the kill zone. And that is If you already have a job and you have momentum. You're probably at a stage where you've had some management, communication ability. Some maturity, know the business. Uh And Employment. On a longer on a longer, like if you pull the average back, unemployment is is about kind of where it's been on average over the last fifty years. It's just still less we've gotten spoiled in the last seventeen years when head owners were calling people trying to pick people off. So structurally things are better than they used to be. Workers fifty five plus are the fastest growing part of the labor market. They're now twenty four percent of the workforce versus ten to twelve percent in the nineties. This is improved because people are in better shape. It's a the sh there's been a shift from physical work to information work. And also quite frankly some of it's economic. Less generous pensions, people need to work longer. So It's much more feasible today to work in your sixties and seventies than it used to be. But tactically if you don't have skills. It's harder than before to get hired because there's more friction in hiring, especially starting earlier than people think. And if people don't get a certain momentum, they can age out early. So it's sort of easier to stay employed than it is to get reemployed. And I think the data supports this as sort of a no hire, no fire environment right now. Now in terms of The winners, educated high school workers, people in relationship driven roles and those who stay continuously employed, the losers are quite frankly uh probably um people, i. mothers who've taken time off and are trying to re enter the workforce, non college educated men especially been Hit hard and then people in industries that are being disrupted. So I guess my takeaway here is that I don't think things are as bad as you think. And lean into your strength in terms of some of the skills you've acquired, maturity, EQ. And uh I don't know, for lack of a better term, try and try and lean into being, if you will, the adult in the room who can manage a younger workforce. Anyways, uh hope that's helpful. But again, I don't think things are as bad as you as you might be. Um you might think. Question number two comes from Zillagram on Instagram. They say. What should college age kids study? Anish, your thoughts. Yeah, well, uh This is uh the it question for a lot of college kids, for their parents. I don't have a single answer in the way that for a while it was go get a CS degree or a coding boot camp. um certificate or before that the MBA and and I think that's a good thing because I think where we're going at work and a lot of educational institutions most aren't adapting fast enough. So you can't count on them. You've got to sort of like push this. new way of learning, uh, into your day to day on your own. Where we're going at work is that you gotta know the AIs. That's becoming table stakes at um Every interview. So you got to know the tools, know how you're using them, have work product that you've you've got because of the tools, something you created, something you built, something that taught you in a new way. You've got to have real examples uh on how you're using these tools. then you're really gonna just wanna learn constantly about yourself and really get to what you've talked about, Scott, that talent zone of like something you do really well that the world will pay you for. And a lot of what we don't know about where work is going is that if you can align that with stuff you're really into, stuff that you're curious about, that you want to learn about beyond college, that you want to get better at, beyond the four years or two years. that you're at college, like you're gonna be in a good spot because you're gonna be able to keep growing in the ways you need to. I think this is gonna be um a good heyday for the liberal arts as someone who has a liberal arts degree. Um I think that colleges are gonna have to kinda make these degrees more attractive to employers. Math had to do that as engineering degrees emerged uh in the nineteenth century, applied humanities, I think. is gonna need to be a thing. I also think giving students more ability to create their own major across disciplines. So a mix of computer science and philosophy and neuroscience. Things that allow them to really bring a unique perspective to the work that they do is something that's probably coming to education, but you're you want to get to a place where you're really getting comfortable with constantly learning. That term like friction maxing. There's something about that that I think when you're in college, you're learning these social skills, you're putting yourself out there, you gotta learn how to navigate different people, different settings. That's all gonna be huge as you get into work. knowing kind of what are the the skills and curiosities and subjects that excite you, that interest you. And then again, like none of this is about one thing. There's a great debate about software engineers. And I totally agree with you, Scott. I think that the headlines are inducing this great fear of a of a wipeout of work. And it limits the ability for us to understand the agency we actually have within work as it's changing, not ending. Software engineering jobs are like up right now. So that doesn't mean that a C S degree is suddenly not worthwhile. Part of C S that's coding. Bucket one, that's AI doing more and more of. But if you get a CS degree, you're coming into the job market with an ability to go after complex problems, with an ability to structure how systems and platforms uh exist. Steve Jobs used to call computer science liberal arts. So that in in all of these degrees, you've got these core skills that you're gonna bring that are uniquely human as AI takes the efficiency work, that have to do work more and more out of our day to day. So I think it's really just knowing the tools knowing yourself and trying to lean towards fields that are pulling you towards them 'cause you've got that curiosity. And then just trust that it's gonna keep going as you get into the labor market. You're not done with that degree. You're not over before you started if you don't have a degree. You're just gonna have to keep learning. And growing as you get into work. I go in rooms now with folks around my age and one of the things I like to ask is raise your hand if what you do day to day links to what you learned in college. And on average I'd say. No more than one or two hands goes up. Um most people are doing day to day what they've just developed over the course of their career. Skills they gained, things that they learned. I just gave you my quick background. I didn't mention where I went to school. It's kind of the least relevant part, um and the degree I have, the least relevant part of what I do. So just trust you're gonna have to keep doing this stuff after after you get out. But handling hard well, the resiliency stuff matters a lot. You learn that in the social dynamics. And then just trying to figure out how you're gonna land in a place where the the stuff you're good at is something that you can get paid for and that you see growth potential as work changes. So I think your job in your twenties is to find something you're good at and it starts in college and I thought I mean the first is forgive yourself if you don't If you find you're not good at something or you don't enjoy it. I when I was fifteen, I thought I was gonna make my living as an athlete. When I was eighteen, my freshman year at UCLA I thought I was gonna be a pediatrician and Chemistry disabused me of that notion. I was not good at it. Um and then I found I was pretty good at economics. So take a ride variety of courses and think what am I What am I good at? And sometimes people mistake their passion for something fun or interesting. They wanna take sports management or fashion. Okay. Find something you might be great at accounting. Uh just try and zero in on something that you're good at. Or find something you have a natural aptitude for. Take a variety of Of course is just to sort of explore different corners, you know, turn on the lights in different corners. You might not have realized that's one of the really if you're fortunate enough to get a liberal arts education. So one of the things I miss about a physspaper is occasionally I would run across an article in the food section. I have no interest in food, but it'd be really well written and I would learn from it. So I like the idea of a liberal arts education. I do think If you have any aptitude for STEM, I do think biology and chemistry courses give you a decent sense of everything. I I it feels like all business In biology and chemistry and you know, to a l a more medic sense, astrophysics if you can endure that. Just give you a sense for how Everything operates. I also think anthropology is super interesting, how we behave the way we behave. Personally the courses that were most valuable to me and I would recommend to my son. But it's not for everybody. One of the courses that changed my life was I took psych ten. I think it was a prerequisite I was an economics major. Does that make sense? Anyways, I had to take psych 10. I had no interest in taking it. And it was so helpful to me 'cause I was a very insecure young man. And what I found is that all these different eroses that other people were as fucked up as me. And that I wasn't unique in feeling insecure and that there was this thing called imposter syndrome and then It just made me feel so much better about the world and myself, learning that that there was this world of Science studying These insecurities and neuroses and s and and things that you where you thought these were abnormalities like No, these abnormalities are normal. So it just made me feel better about myself. Also I would recommend mean nobody knows. Everyone was saying take computer science and Mandarin ten years ago. Okay, how's that working? Right. So nobody knows, but what I do think is Uh I I if you I believe the core competence moving forward, if I were to bet on anything, it would be storytelling, and that is the ability to take data craft a narrative arc and then compel people to action. Whether it's ke convincing to buy your SaaS software, convincing them to go on a date with you, convincing them to hire you. I think the most successful people are at the end of the day are outstanding storytellers. And some people say salesperson, but I don't think that I think that diminishes the art of the craft. And for me, storytelling began with English one. And that is just an My favorite book is Strunk and White, Elements of Style. I write well. And it's where all my storytelling begins. I think to be a great storyteller, to be a great speaker. To be great with PowerPoint, to be in every nar any narrative form, the place to start, the kind of reading arithmetic, if you will. is to be able to write. So I think if you can come out of college understanding how to write well craft a narrative arc, maybe get an opportunity to present. I think that that's an enduring skill set. But other than that, take a variety of courses until you find something you think, Wow I could be in the top 10% of this and the top one percent of this. But also couched against a reality that if you're borrowing a lot of money to take these courses What am I gonna do with a philosophy degree? And a hundred thousand dollars in student debt. I think there is a practical side to this. And that okay, maybe I just in case I may want to shore up with some accounting courses, which I'm pretty good at, 'cause I know I can get a job at a Big Six or a whatever it is, a Big Three accounting firm, but I'm not entirely sure. what I'm gonna do with a poetry or philosophy degree. And I know that Sounds boomer, but if you're taking on student debt, the reality is you have to be a little bit more pragmatic than people around, will this degree get me a job? So and some any any inclination to take the sciences, I just think that that create the base for anything you do. Learn how to write. And just for your own mental well being, if you're like me and you're you're an insecure 17 year old, which is how old that I was when I started at UCLA, I think some of the basic side courses are really illuminating around the human condition. Thanks for the question. We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. It's a shame when the best B2B marketing gets wasted on the wrong audience. Like imagine running an ad for cataract surgery on Saturday morning cartoons, or running a promo for this show. on a video about Roblox or something. No offense to our Gen Alpha listeners, but that would be a waste of anyone's ad budget. So when you want to reach the right professionals, you can use LinkedIns. LinkedIn has grown to a network of over one billion professionals and 130 million decision makers. According to their data. That's where it stands apart from other ad buys. 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You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday. Welcome back. Question number three comes from Jonas on LinkedIn. Are we overstating the near term impact of AI? In practice, most companies are still in pilots, partial adoption, and unclear ROI. There's a gap between what AI models can do in closed tests versus what actual applications are actually doing and improving output. What do you think about this gap? And Yes, we are overstating um I think AI short term impact. Uh it's felt for workers mainly in these headlines that say either work is done or this entire job category is done or this percentage of jobs is going away. Um and the reason we're overstating it, like what's interesting about the gap to me is We're forgetting that like none of this is determined. None of this is inevitable. AI doesn't have the answer of where this is going. CEOs don't, academic papers don't, predictions don't, the media doesn't. Uh we're gonna decide as individuals, we're gonna decide as societies, we're gonna decide as humanity. It's how it always works. We decide what we're gonna do with this technology. how we're gonna use it, how we're gonna shape the world of work around it. And right now adoption is still really low globally. I think that a lot of workers are a little bit freaked out, a little bit stressed. They're using it in different ways, maybe in in their home life, not their work life, or even if they're using it, it's in incremental ways. And none of this is gonna move forward until we bring people along. Until this becomes something that is about what do we people, what do we as humans want to do with this tool? Um we have a book coming out that goes through all of this for everyone, how to think about this change and how to think about your job, your career. But also we talk about companies and economies. And in the company chapter, we remind folks that when electricity became a thing. A lot of factory owners just put the electric motor where the steam engine was and assume that that one shift would change everything and it changed little to nothing. It wasn't until factory started redesigning. the literal like way that the factory was built. multi-story became single floor, the way that work traveled around the workflows because now individual workers could have individual motors. That's when you saw productivity start to surge. So companies are going to have to kind of completely redesign workflow around AI, but that's not even gonna be the hard part or even the fun part for us as workers. It's when we reimagine work around human capability. This is not about artificial intelligence. This is all going to be about human intelligence. book isn't a how to AI, it's a how to human with AI, with most of the focus on the human part. brain, which I think is the still most amazing, incredible known object in the known universe. It's been around far longer than the work we're all living right now. The work we're living now is a product of the industrial age. It's a couple hundred years old, and it's work that has made us machine like. Everything has been about efficiency. How do we do more better faster, more better, faster, more better, faster? We prize the technical skills and the analytic skills most of all in this economy as everything's been about the production of goods and services. Quicker, faster, better. Well, we're going to get out machined by the machines. And that means we're going to go back to some of these fundamentals that have allowed humans to progress over millennia that allow us to be an incredibly intrepid, imaginative, uh innovative bunch that creates things like the monetary order. The nation state, the entire world around us. emerged 'cause humans just came together and imagined something that didn't exist and then went and made it so. Um and so we're we're sort of over hyping AI and under hyping our own ability as humans. And I think that'cause 'cause we've developed this like shrunken sense of self in the industrial age at who we are and what we're capable of doing. Um and so I think that as We start telling a different story to your point about storytelling, you know, Joan Diddy and has that great line. We tell ourselves stories in order to live. story of self is the most important. So what is the story of self we're telling right now as humans? It's gotta be that we're pretty badass and that there's so much more we can do at work than what we've been doing at work. And how do we use this tool to make that so, to help us learn in new ways. If you hated how you learned. in the systems are about routinized learning and memorization, the tool's gonna help you learn all sorts of new stuff in ways that you're gonna like and that you're gonna actually learn from. If you want to go build stuff, I want to build this app or I want to create this video or this like. kick ass PowerPoint deck and you didn't know how to do that before, the tools are going to help you do that too. So I think once we figure out the better story that brings folks into this. And we Empower individuals to change their jobs in their day to day around these core, you know, human capabilities. We're gonna realize that sort of hiding in plain sight has been our capabilities as humans and then start to see what's possible as we see new businesses start. people changing uh businesses from within in terms of what they're trying to do and new business lines launch. So we are overestimating AI because we're under m underestimating humans, I think. Uh yeah, I I agree. I think we're We are in fact overstating the near term impact of AI, but well I I think it's sector specific, so If you look at the battles or the wars in Ukraine and in Iran, AI is playing a huge role. I think that they're if they launch a a flurry of um of Shahead drones, you know AI is determining how many they send up and at what time. And what defensive measures they're essentially machines are planning things and launching missiles much faster than humans can with greater accuracy. So I think And also I would imagine in terms of things like drug discovery, we might finally be on the dawn of amazing drug discovery. So I I think the impact is probably not overestimated there. I think what we have a tendency to catastrophize and overestimate the impact is the destruction. Or the quote unquote impending destruction in the labor force. Um I just don't think you see it yet or a lot of evidence of it. Sure, it's it's not a good time to be sort of a mediocre lawyer. We're definitely in customer service. I don't see any reason why. There's gonna you know, there won't be a ton of new business ideas looking to fill in different niches. When I graduate from business school, there were only two entrepreneurs in my entire class and the second one was my co founder. So I think it'll You know, like every other forty percent of us used to work in agricultural not uh agriculture. I think it's only two percent now. And some jobs will go away. I do I think truck drivers are probably gonna go away in the next ten years. Uh secretaries. Nyight percent of secretaries have gone away, but at the same time, accountants, there's more of them. And you would have thought, Okay, I would take that out. So I don't see the impending job apocalypse that everyone else Um everyone else's. Now according to this MIT study And a lot of people have criticized the study, but directionally I think it's correct. They found that ninety five percent of enterprise pilots delivered zero measurable P and L impact and most companies are still experimenting but not transforming. And then Apollo's chief economist, Torsten Salk, said AI is everywhere except in the incoming macroeconomic data. So there and you said there's no meaningful signal in the productivity or inflation, which is striking given how much money is going in. And research from Wharton Business School puts AI's actual contribution to productivity growth at one hundredth of a base of a percentage point in twenty twenty five. So one basis point. So The gains are real, but they're pretty narrow. The St. Louis Fed found that across US workers. Us it US and non users combined save uh AI saves about one and a half percent of total work hours. So I don't I just don't see the I I think we're on the age I'd like to think we're on the age of a great discovery on health. That's probably because I'm aging and hoping that, you know, I'm I'm not gonna get the ass cancer or that someone will be able to figure it out and I'll die of something else. Two I do think it's gonna change warfare. Um but in terms of This notion, you know, all this bullshit from Elon Musk and none of us will have jobs. I I just don't buy it. I I I don't see it. I don't think there's any evidence of it in the data. Uh, and also I think there's a lot of AI washing around employment and that is if you're a CO laying off people. What's a better narrative for your share price? I fucked up and overhired after Covid. I'm not very good at what I do and I haven't stimulated enough demand for my current workforce or I'm part of the Pepsi generation and we're leveraging AI to cut costs. So I think the a lot of these layoffs are couched under the auspices of AI as opposed to the managerial and competence. It's the real culprit. Thanks. All right, Anish. Uh that's it. Anish Raman is the chief economic opportunity officer at LinkedIn. He's also a former CNN war correspondent and speech writer to President Barack Obama. His new book Open to Work. book on Thriving in the AI age is out now. Uh Anish, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. Thanks the questions.