On “Make Me Smart” episode “It’s tough our there for new college grads“, Kimberly Adams interviewed NYT writer Noam Scheiber. He mentioned in the world with so much AI, there’s still going to be a need for people who can synthesize and make a decision and make an argument. That stopped me cold because it’s a similar argument that I recall from reading A Whole New Mind back… 20 years ago.

Back then, it was saving my job from going to overseas outsourcing. Working in IT, I saw plenty of cases where the vendors I worked with (BEA, Oracle, HP) open overseas support desks. Over the ensuing two decades I’ve probably worked with a few dozen support people who seemed to work in distant time zones. Now, it’s artificial intelligence. I guess we will see. In both cases, it’s how to be valuable enough to still have a job.

I feel like back then, the argument was shipping overseas the easy jobs so that onshore employees could focus on higher order thinking jobs. Similar to using AI to do that work. So, I guess the question is why so many more IT jobs 20 years didn’t go overseas? The worry was IT in the 2000s would go the way of manufacturing. Did H1-B VISAs help? That doesn’t seem a relevant mitigation to AI. We didn’t create that many college graduates. I wonder how much of it was Enshittification? It felt like in that era, people really complained about all this overseas support in terms of resolution, feeling supported, and making a favorable impression of the company. It cut costs that cut brand image.