When visiting Seattle Center a couple weeks ago, my 16-year old son and I saw a fast food robot cooking fries. It picked up wire baskets and dumped fries out of fryers within a glass enclosure. I’d heard about automation in fast food restaurants but had not actually seen it before. It was creepy and graceful. Working with searing hot fat in timed tasks seems like a perfect job to automate.

And yet, it is easy to be blasé when it’s not your job at risk of replacement by a robot or artificial intelligence (AI). Only recently have non-technical knowledge workers like myself felt the discomfort of generative AI and their large language models completing some of my job tasks like writing. Last November, OpenAI’s ChatGPt felt like a moon landing when it was released to non-technical people – it is the quickest, most widely adopted consumer product of all time.

It’s true that for decades we’ve known about AI and the effects of automation on occupations.  Since 2015, websites like Oxford University’s Future of Employment and Robots, Jobs and Resilience offer ways to plug in an occupation and get a prediction about its automation risk. But until recently, for knowledge workers, it seemed in the distant future.

Is the change we’re seeing right now in careers “exponential?” Yes, I believe so for two reasons.

Current Change in Career Paths is Exponential

First, there is exponential growth in compute power – the capacity of machine learning models to train and learn. The technological foundations of AI are becoming more powerful, more quickly than ever before – like 750x more powerful every two years.  By comparison, Moore’s Law is slow - the long-held principle that computer speed and capability doubles every two years, as a result of increases in the number of transistors a microchip can contain.

Second, the speed and breadth of adoption of AI skills by employers. These include skills not only used by engineers, but also non-technical workers in finance, law, marketing and sales. This is only the beginning. Note that when the data was collected for the chart below, ChatGPT 3.5 had not yet been released (in November 2022).

The Best Defense is a Good Offense

In future blogs, I’ll explore why employers are embracing these new technologies and the impacts of AI on occupations. But for now, it’s enough to notice the wave of exponential change bearing down upon us as career development professionals.

Then, let’s get ready to help our students and clients “work the system” so it doesn’t work against them or leave them out of opportunity. To use a sports metaphor, the best defense is a good offense.