Everyone has a bias, and those of us who went through college or university are the worst. Our bias is the knowledge gained from attending the college or university translates into a higher than average paying job in the economy. If you go back before WWII, it has a given because few people went to post-secondary education. When the GIs came back, Washington helped with discounted mortgages, access to post-secondary and the economy changed to a service economy which helped many of them to achieve higher than average paying jobs. The economy is continuing to change and while the goal of post-secondary education is a noble one and if you can go you should pursue the education, the high paying jobs are not the only jobs with a post-secondary education. (Hint, if you go by a heating and cooling contractor, count the number of trucks, if the number is 10 or more the owners are likely millionaires.) However, the people who write the news did receive a post-secondary education.

In an article by Claire Cain Miller and Courtney Cox of the New York Times News Service, AI is being used in the office and fewer people will be needed, the research has found. ChatGPT and Google’s Bard are tools that can rapidly process and synthesize information and generate new content.

Erik Brynjolfson, a professor at the Stanford Institute of Human Centered AI says to be brutally honest, we (society) had a hierarchy of things that technology could do and we felt comfortable saying things like creative work, professional work, emotional intelligence would be hard for machines to ever do. Now that has is upended.

A range of new research has analyzed the tasks of US workers by the Labour Department’s O’Net database and hypothesized which of them large language models could do. The results indicate between 1/5 and 1/4 of all occupations. A similar study by OpenAI of 923 occupations found that large language models could do up to 80% of the work. There is a good reason to expect jobs will decrease.

It is not always a bad thing, Morgan Stanley uses a version of OpenAI’s model made for its business that was fed about 100,000 internal documents, more than 1 million pages. Financial advisors can find information to help answer clients’ questions quickly. This allows more time to talk to clients about wealth management. Often times an advisor is reading or in meetings about companies, now the information is closer to their touch.

Most resume services use some type of AI to go through the applications.

Law firms deal with a great deal of information and the research time and preparation time goes down with an AI program, such as Harvey. Even with the program, you still need a lawyer to determine strategy, opening remarks, what to negotiate on.

A study of customer support agents found that AI increased productivity by 14% overall and 35% of the lowest skilled workers.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, as an owner you are expecting the use of AI to go throughout the company resulting in increased productivity and lowering of costs while selling more goods and services. This will result in the steady profits and the ability for the company to pay dividends. To the overall economy there will be dislocations, but as an investment you are only worried about the company(ies) you invest in.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.