Amid LLMs and Tech Layoffs, Are Digital Skills Still Worth Acquiring?

There is a recent report on TheStreet, Tech companies kick off the new year with more layoffs, stating that, “Just two weeks into the new year, 46 tech companies have laid off around 7,500 workers – that’s according to layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Last year, tech companies laid off more than 260,000 employees. Google slashed 12,000 jobs, more than any other company, while both Microsoft and Meta both laid off 10,000 employees. But the job cuts aren’t just coming from the tech world. The financial industry has also been hit hard, with Citigroup announcing its plans to let go of 10 percent of its workforce, roughly 20,000 people, over the next two years. And BlackRock has plans to slash 3 percent of its positions – which is about 600 employees.”

The recent decades have been lucrative for digital skills across the spectrum, as technology percolated human productivity and social activities. Digital skills, from beginner to intermediate to professional, became valued in respective roles, making steep economic differences for individuals.

Technology brought efficiency. It exponentially drove scale, expanded marketplaces, included many, shredded barriers, cut time and did more. It changed a lot of ways of doing things from the past. It came with some job losses, but overall, enabled new jobs.

Job losses have been a panic factor around new technology throughout history, in part because it required fewer humans to work, yet those humans controlled it. Also, there were often offset for the people that were displaced.

The dawn of the internet resulted in lots of labor reshuffling, yet humans powered the net. The problem, however, was that nothing in history has had a memory as accurate as digital. It not only kept records, better than papers, frescoes and sculptures, it displayed them as they played out in the physical.

A key strength of all species is memory. The ability to take from the environment, know and understand what it is. While recall may not often be accurate, memory helps to navigate, thrive and survive.

This memory became what digital got right, in ways that beat organisms and other non-organisms. The memory, however, generally stayed the same until adjustments by humans. LLMs changed that.

Now, within digital, it is possible to have contents in different forms that were not shaped by humans. Generative AI can act on what is available in digital, carrying out some tasks at the level of expertise of some humans.

This is happening in a digital-dominated world. This means that in the second most important sphere after the physical for humans, something else operates there that can rival aspects of human agency and intelligence.

It is an indication that as LLMs continue to improve, certain digital skills may not be as valuable. This means that to create jobs in future, corporations and policy makers may need to seek out new frontiers aside from digital, where jobs might be possible for the rest of the century. Part of this will require rethinking value for some current non-work activities, as well as contriving alternatives to compensation.

There are needs for clean energy sources where physical work would be necessary. There are those in waste management, against microplastics. There are others with safety, agriculture and so forth. The purpose will be to ensure that an alternative is found for mass employment against the chance of digitally-driven job losses.

Digital skills may be necessary in aspects that human agency may remain and LLMs may find it tough to learn, which—for now, is unclear.

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This Post is republished on Medium.

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