Is AI Automation Comparable to the Invention of the Washing Machine?

This is a good and revealing analogy by the asker of this question. First, it raises a point that’s at the heart of the discussion of automation: the labour-saving appliances that were presented to households (and the women that did the majority of the work in them) did not see a reduction in the hours the women spent working. Instead, while these machines took on some of the labour, the women did not work less. They just found they had other work that also needed doing.

So, the question is whether AI means the same for knowledge/office workers now that the tools are arriving that handle many typical office tasks. To create a picture of what this means, let’s look at several possible outcomes of the mass automation of knowledge work, where more can be done in less time:

Abundance of service – much more work will be done because the market or customer will demand and absorb it, especially when costs for it don’t go up.

Increased quality – about the same amount of work is done but it is produced to a higher standard in the same time and for the same cost.

Reduced costs – the market or customer seizes the opportunity to save money on the service, reduces spend and reinvests it elsewhere.

New markets and customers – a tier of customer that was previously priced out is now open and ready to buy this newly affordable service.

Marketing, one of the earlier affected areas of knowledge work, is seeing all of these effects underway. As to how much, how fast and who is affected all depends on a range of factors such as area of marketing, level of role, business model, size and volume of customers, competition and more. For the purpose of this post, I won’t go into those further because there’s also a second point this question raises.

Likening 'AI' to an invention such as the washing machine or even a category of inventions like household appliances, understates and underestimates the impact and power of the technology. A closer comparison would be the internet or even electricity. AI is an entire field that’s reached a threshold that enables the invention of thousands of new tools, machines and services, as well as speeding up the development of many established ones.

This means that predicting the impact of AI by comparing it to past inventions or industrial transformations is problematic because we’re likely dealing with a different scale and speed this time. AI is hitting everything, everywhere, all at once. The individual effects may be recognizable to us but we’ll have to see whether our institutions can adapt rapidly enough to maintain business as usual.