You don't get it: North Carolina's AI problem is urgent
The AI revolution is happening fast, and North Carolina needs to act now to help avoid a severe workforce disruption
I wrote earlier this week that North Carolina needs to get going on AI legislation, but I don't think I conveyed just how urgent this is. Adapting our education system and workforce to an AI future is likely the most important policy issue facing our country right now, and the states that get it right will be at a huge advantage.
The states that don’t… well, it won’t be pretty.
If you don't believe me, listen to this podcast featuring an interview with a company CEO about how he uses AI now and how he plans to in the future (warning, there is a lot of bad language in there). Or this video with investor Chris Sacca (again, really bad language). It's eye-opening.
He says that AI right now is like AOL dial-up was at the dawn of the internet — a fun little tool, but not super useful. He's right on the money.
ChatGPT is fun to play with and helps a lot with lower-level tasks, but it's a pain to get it to do what you want it to. For AI to help with more complex tasks, you have to cobble together multiple tools and patch things up when the system breaks.
But this is rapidly changing, and every other week companies like OpenAI are rolling out new and better products. Even just since I published the piece on Monday, OpenAI has introduced an AI agent that can interact with the live web.
A lot of these fun little tools will get rolled up into larger systems that can seamlessly handle more tasks1. And in the next 12-18 months, picture having an "AI employee" that you can send emails to or even talk to on a video call to explain what you want. It will bring back a result that’s better than what you’re used to from a low-level employee.
This could quickly wipe out hundreds of thousands of entry-level white-collar jobs — new lawyers, data analysts, accountants, marketers, customer service reps, and really anybody who works in an office. “Learn to code” used to be the buzzword, but now even that is obsolete. Entry-level programmers are on the chopping block, as well.
People with expertise and experience in their fields will be insulated for a lot longer, but the pipeline to take North Carolinians from the careers of their 20s to the ones of their 40s and 50s will likely be completely upended.
Perhaps it won't work, but very smart people believe that this will be a huge disruption to the economy that's greater than the impacts of offshoring manufacturing in the 90s or even the Industrial Revolution.
What North Carolina needs to do
The answer is not going to be outlawing AI. This poses its own threats — most notably to national security. America needs to lead the AI revolution, and North Carolina needs to be a leader within that. The workforce will reach some sort of equilibrium again, but it’s the role of public policy to ease the transition as much as possible and set our people up for success.
That means North Carolina needs to figure out what all the newly minted college graduates are going to do for work, and then adapt the education system around that. Right now, only three community colleges in North Carolina have programs that even touch on AI. This needs to change fast.
The K-12 education pipeline is still geared around sending kids to four-year state universities for humanities degrees that could soon become nearly worthless. There will be new and different jobs created, but we need to figure out right now what those could look like and orient our high schools around them.
The trade school route will get even more important, and North Carolina should double down on that path, too.
I don’t have all the answers. Maybe “AI management” is the new skill set to have. Maybe it’s not.
But overall, my point is that we need to have much more urgency as a state around this issue. We don’t necessarily need to be scared, because there’s so much opportunity. But we do need to be smart about it — and quick. This will all happen faster than you think.
Here’s a good first step. Without Rep. Jason Saine in the legislature anymore, we’ll need a new person to lead the charge here in the General Assembly. Who will raise their hand?
Services like Gmail will have all the different email response and sorting features that now you need to buy plug-ins to do. Somebody will create a good end-to-end video creator, because right now all the options on the market are pretty bad.