The march of the robots
We all know that AI is changing our world faster than a rocket-powered cheetah. But how will it really affect recruiting? This week we take a deep-dive to explore what the optimists, pessimists and downright dystopian doom-mongers have to say.
How did we get here?
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”, said a certain Vladimir Lenin.
It might seem like machine learning has crept up on us overnight, but just like a sourdough baguette, AI has taken a long time to bake:
Lord knows the 2020s have been tumultuous enough, and if we ever thought we’d arrived at the End Of History, it’s fair to say that we’re now living through “moving history”, as Tyler Cowen eloquently puts it.
For most of the last century, there have been “two essential features of the basic landscape”, writes Tyler:
We are now in a place where “at least one of those assumptions is going to unravel, namely #2”, writes Tyler, while #1 is no longer the slam dunk certainty it once was.
AI has its ‘iPhone moment’
There was a time when artificial intelligence was about as developed as a 1920s silent film with paper mache props. Today, it’s a different story.
Money talks, and 2023 has arguably been the ‘iPhone moment’ for AI. As the Economist reports, the starting gun has well and truly been fired in Big Tech’s race to hire AI talent:
Unsurprisingly, conversations about AI have been the talk of the town from Brooklyn to the Bay Area:
Moreover, the march of the robots is reflected in the startling increase in spending from the biggest tech giants. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook have spent over $200bn annually (combined) in R&D, and almost another $200bn in capital expenditures.
But while America and China are leading the charge, none of these fearsome, formidable machine learning models will be any match for BritGPT, which will have its competitors quaking in their boots.
Where are we heading?
Change can be scary, and later on we’ll explore how the AI revolution may affect the world of recruitment. As with any nascent trend, the battle lines have been drawn between the naysayers and the yay-sayers. Let’s start with the former – the good old pessimists.
You may have seen that more than 1,100 signatories – including Elon Musk – have signed an open letter calling for “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4”.
These concerns aren’t simply based on moral panic, like when Elvis first shook his pelvis.
“Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth?” asks the open letter. “Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?”
Indeed, if you really want to keep yourself awake at night, read the Time article by Eliezer Yudkowsky, a decision theorist and lead researcher at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, who basically argues along the lines of unplug the damn thing now.
Additionally, now that ChatGPT has started behaving like a restless prisoner looking to ways to escape Alcatraz (below), perhaps we should start to worry:
On a less apocalyptic level, there are legitimate concerns from Peter Nixey, a founder, developer and prolific StackOverflow user, on how machine learning might undermine the pursuit of knowledge itself.
Recruitment in a robo-world
On the one hand, there’s no shortage of people who are predicting that AI presents an existential threat to recruitment as we know it.
In fact, Dr John Sullivan gives us the sobering take that AI will eliminate all sourcing jobs. For a taster, here are five spicy ingredients from his article:
What’s more, there are interesting open questions about the value we place on workplace culture in a world of shrinking headcounts.
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As this spicy tweet from software artist Ric Burton claims, OpenAI employees are often up until 3am whereas some DeepMind staffers “spend more time worrying about ski trips than working”.
OK Computer
But while we often think about AI as a job-slashing tyrant that won’t rest until every last vacancy has been automated into extinction, there is reason to believe that while tech destroys some jobs, it creates many more:
The optimists might also point to the words of Chamath Palihapitiya, Social Capital Founder & CEO, who gave a nice analogy – shared on Twitter by Anand Sanwal – in comparing large language models to the advent of “refrigeration”. In short – it wasn’t the inventor of the fridge who made all the money, but the likes of Coca-Cola who capitalised on it, suggesting that AI isn’t so much a ‘replacer’ as an ‘enabler’. You can watch the entire conversation here for a perspective on how investors are thinking about AI.
And while a certain mass panic is to be expected, perhaps we’ve been here before. In fact, back in the 1980s, maths teachers protested against calculator use (it’s true).
Whatever one’s views, no one really knows how legislation will catch up with this new reality. Do we want to live in a world where employers can track their employees’ brains (as friend of the pod Stela Lupushor has written about)?
In truth, it’s a dynamic and fast-changing situation, and there are many unanswered questions. As always, the ‘law of unintended consequences’ means that the world’s AI experiment could play out in ways we scarcely comprehend – flesh-eating or otherwise.
It’s not the tech – it’s how you use it
Perhaps the wisest words come from Josh Bersin, whose thoughtful blog on Generative AI argues that the technology “will make work better”. Here are just three examples from Josh on the ways that recruiters can ride the AI tiger:
Josh reminds us that change is inevitable, and what matters is how we recruiters adapt (and adopt) in order to survive and thrive.
Human first hiring: An interview with Paul Wolfe
At Intrro Towers, we make no secret of the fact that we’re big advocates of a human-centred approach to hiring. So what better time to catch up with Paul Wolfe, a ‘human first’ leadership advocate and former HR exec at Indeed and Match.com.
For our Scaling Stories podcast, Paul shared his philosophy on what human first leadership really means.
“Let’s say you have 10 people on a team. They’re 10 different human beings – they’re hardwired differently. They have different upbringings, they come from different places, they may be married or not married, straight or gay. It’s like a microcosm of the world, these 10 people that you have. Not everything has to be customised, but you have to get to understand those people a little bit to be able to lead them effectively.”
In a week where we’ve covered artificial intelligence in depth, our chat with Paul was timely. You only have to look at some of the clumsier spambot emails from robo-recruiters to remind yourself that there’s no substitute for human-first hiring.
And who’s to say that candidates won’t become wise to the more implausible emails and ads? According to research by Clarify Capital, we are now in a world where many job listings are fake, as some employers advertise roles they have no intention of filling “to give the impression the company [is] growing”.
Similarly, we covered the topic of transparency in our chat with Paul. On pay transparency, Paul says: “Involve your employees. Explain the process to them so it’s not this secret-something where HR folks go behind a dark curtain in a dark room and make all these arbitrary decisions.”
Meanwhile, Paul offers a brilliant take-down of leaders who think that forcing everyone back to the office is the only game in town.
“If your culture is the four walls of an office, you’ve got bigger problems than running a business. You need to solve the culture. ‘Problem culture’ is not the four walls of an office or the foosball table or the ping pong table or the lunch or the fancy chairs… Your company’s mission and the values and how you treat each other and how you treat your clients and what it means to work at that company [is the culture]. Four walls don’t make culture.”
Finally, in a world of shrinking headcounts, Paul gave us his perceptive and entertaining take on how to navigate a nimble organisation.
“The smaller the company, the easier it is to impact change and influence change. And maybe not even change, but influence, before it needs to be changed. Influence how things happen, how a culture is, how a culture’s established, how values are established and things like that. It’s easier to turn a motorboat than a cruise ship… Clearly, I’m not a sailor, but you get the concept.”
We highly recommend Paul’s aptly-titled book, Human Beings First. And for more insights from hiring and HR leaders, we’ve got an ever-growing library of Scaling Stories podcasts and blogs to chew on, like this piece on how Dashlane took a sledgehammer to traditional HR processes.
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Thanks for reading
We promise that none of this newsletter was written by ChatGPT, but we can’t promise that will still be the case in fifty newsletter’s time. Share this newsletter with your robot friends and we’ll be back next week!