Artificial intelligence is now a force to reckon with rather than a far-off disruption, Matt Shumer, CEO of AI startup HyperWrite, has said. In a descriptive essay on X (formerly Twitter), Shumer warned that the future of white-collar jobs, performed mostly on a computer screen, is susceptible to automation.
In the essay titled 'Something Big Is Happening', Shumer explained that AI systems are quickly gaining the ability to complete tasks that are digital, structured, and repetitive. He claimed that society is underestimating the pace and scope of change by drawing a comparison between the current state of AI and early 2020, shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic shook markets.
After six years of creating and funding AI businesses, Shumer said he has had trouble communicating the scope of the shift to friends and family who are not in the tech industry. "I believe we are in the 'this seems overblown' phase of something much bigger than Covid," Shumer wrote.
He pointed out that AI technologies can already handle complex technical jobs, such as writing and debugging code, conducting legal research, and creating reports. He claimed that AI can perform technical tasks in his own workflow that needed teams of engineers in the past.
Jobs Most Exposed to AI Disruption
According to Shumer, a cluster of "screen-based" professions is facing early impact. These include:
Legal work: Contract reading, case law draft, legal research
Financial analysis: Building financial models, writing investment memos, analysing data, generating reports
Content/Writing: Reports, journalism, marketing, technical writing
Software engineer: Multi-day projects
Medical analysis: Lab results analysis, scan readings, diagnoses suggestion, literature review
Customer service: Handling complex multi-step problems
"If your job happens on a screen ... then AI is coming for significant parts of it. The timeline isn't 'someday'. It's already started," Shumer warned. This means that if a large portion of your work involves reading, writing, analysing, making decisions, and communicating via a keyboard, then it is vulnerable to automation.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, the AI industry's most safety-conscious head, publicly stated that AI will "eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years."
Shumer recommends making use of premium AI tools, which, according to him, are significantly superior to free ones. Use AI for actual tasks rather than just answering brief queries, and develop financial stability in the wake of possible employment disruptions.
"Spend one hour a day experimenting with AI ... Try a new tool. Give it a harder problem. One hour a day, every day. If you do this for 6 months, you will understand what's coming better than 99% of the people around you," Shumer suggested.
Read the full essay here:
He stated in his piece that he is "no longer needed for the actual technical work" of his job. "I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just... appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing," he noted.
