The AI Agent boom is triggering a lot of people and creating a kind of existential crisis about white collar jobs.
Due to personal experience in manufacturing and technology and general nerdiness about business and history, I think I may have some thoughts to share. They do not reflect the official position of OSS Ventures nor any of our portfolio companies. It’s just thinking, so take it as such.
Before the steam machine, most people occupation was either agriculture or some kind of physical work to make things. 70% roughly in the UK.
Then the steam machine arrived and over roughly 40 years, everything changed. It was a hard transition and the blue collars got the short end of the stick. They got declassed and it was hard.
Our typical factory is now 1 hour of human for 10 equivalent hours of machines. Most blue collars are actually machine operators, sometimes multi machines up to a little fleet. They are solving issues and making the machines work together and do the final 5% that machines cannot really do.
This change took 30 years and in the grand scheme of things, only companies big enough and innovative enough survived. The average size of company went way up in the operations, because this is difficult to organize. The too-small-to-survive companies either died or got acquired.
From a social point of view, everybody changed jobs and we created another type of occupation such as marketing manager, happiness manager, community lead or service jobs and got way more people in research and academia, with the boom of higher education. The state also morphed to accommodate with this new reality, with concepts such as production taxes or unemployment benefits.
The parallels with agents are simple : agents can and probably will replace 95% of current repetitive white collar jobs, including data entry, simple benchmarking, coordination tasks, reasoning.
There are a lot of interesting questions in there :
- What will be the profile of early winners ? Big companies able to change themselves into adopting this faster than the competition ? Small companies creating an outsized efficient playbook buying the big ones ? One already sees some capitalists betting on the first, with VC firms investing in accounting firms.
- What will be the social consequences of this ? The state as we know it in the West is largely a post-rationalization of what is needed in the age of the steam machine. What does a AGI society looks like ?
- What will be the next iteration of human value creation in this world ? If intellectual raw horsepower goes out of fashion the way physical strength went, what will humans uniquely value in this new world ?
- What is the timeline of this change ? Steam machine took 40 years. There is an argument to say that cycles are way shorter now. There is also another argument that human cycles are human cycles and the speed of change is not that different now.
- Will this be a new iteration of war also ? The first and second world war were largely the wars of machines, won in factories and research labs. What is war in the age of AI ? The cookie-cutter “get data for insights” seems like a poor iteration. Drone swarms and asymmetric warfare with the upper hand to low-cost, self-guided weapons seems more likely, with early iterations being used in Ukraine.
It’s going to be a ride.
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