AI is a Job Creator – Techstrong AI Podcast EP49

Hello, and welcome to the Techstrong AI Podcast. I'm Amanda Ani, and with me today I am happy to have Steve DeAngelos. He is the founder and CEO of Interra Solutions.

How are you doing today? I'm doing well, Amanda. How are you?

Doing well. Can you share a little bit about Interra Solutions? What services do you provide?

Sure. Interra Solutions is a artificial intelligence and applied mathematics company that performs, um, uses artificial intelligence to perform end-to-end value chain optimization and decision making for, uh, mid-size and large corporations. Wonderful.

Well, our topic of the day is AI as a job creator. So that's a, that's an interesting topic because, you know, we hear a lot of people, they're afraid about incorporating AI because they're worried it's going to take over their jobs and they're gonna be without jobs. Or, um, recently, um, someone came out and talked about AI was gonna reduce the wages of everyone.

Um, so what are your thoughts on this and, and why do you think that it is in fact, um, going to be a, a job creator? Well, look, you know, with any transformative tech technology, some jobs are, are created and sub jobs are lost. But like with the first wave of, of technology in the 1970s and eighties, um, certain classes of jobs went away and many more classes of jobs were opened up.

And I, I'm actually very, very encouraged by AI and a particular generative AI's ability to act as a net job creator and quite frankly, act as a net middle class job creator. Um, and lemme tell you a little bit about why I think that, you know, as you think about large, um, tech firms like Open AI and Nvidia and others, you know, creating data centers that are going to power the, that are gonna be used to, to create generative ai, large language models, those data centers have to consume electricity. Those data centers have to, um, build infrastructure to, to support that work.

So if you think about OpenAI, um, and Microsoft divesting $120 billion in one data center in Texas, right? It's the amount of jobs that are created in that field, um, that are both infrastructure creation. Like we have to build a new power plant to have that power plant, uh, power, the, the, uh, factory that's going to manufacture the chips to then power the data centers that are going to, that are going to create the large language bottles and all the jobs that are incumbent with that, whether it be the construction jobs or the raw materials used in the, in the construction process, the real estate that gets purchased, the housing that gets purchased around the, the data centers and others.

It creates a massive amount of infrastructure and, um, construction and development related jobs that attend to the industry, creating a whole new set of AI jobs, right? So whether they be, you know, people at the top of a pyramid who are kind of like PhD scientists who conceive of how the chips should be manufactured or conceive of how the, the large language model should be designed and, and structured to the software engineers, to the coders, to the people that generate prompts. There's a, you know, sort of a think about a pyramid of jobs that, um, you know, you don't have to be a PhD scientist from a leading university to, to, um, play in the generative AI space.

So I think there is a whole class of, of jobs that can be built that can be replacing, quite frankly, middle class jobs that over the last several decades were offshore to other countries, right? So you used to be able to earn a middle, middle class living by working at the US steel plant. Those jobs largely went away in the 1970s, eighties and nineties, right?

And they haven't been replaced. This is a way of replacing really good wage jobs, right? Where you don't have to have the same level of education as the PhD mathematician would, but you're, you can earn a great living by, um, getting trained on ai, um, generative AI skills that would allow you to, um, you know, put your kids through college, establish a great life for yourself.

And, you know, so I, so I'm really bullish about AI being a net job creator. So what are some of the degree plans that you would recommend for people getting outta high school or younger adults looking to further their education? What, what would you recommend would be the, the best degree plans to look at?

Well, it depends. If you wanna go to college, then there's a set of college related plans in computer science, college related plans and artificial intelligence applied mathematics, right? And then there are likely vocational jobs that you can learn to be a prompt engineer, you can learn to do to, um, to build AI related applications on top of the foundational AI model.

So, for example, there will be likely an entire class of job that are creating, you know, anywhere from sort of micro applications to much bigger applications that are used that are gonna be, um, uh, developed to have people generate prompts, to have people utilize the generative AI tools that the large tech firms are going to create or have created. And those kinds of jobs, you can learn vocationally. You don't need a college degree in computer science to be a prompt engineer, right?

You can, you can learn a, a, a skill and a craft to do that very well. And those jobs are in high demand right now. There isn't a trained army of people that can do those jobs safe.

So if I was a young person and I was not inclined to go to college, but I wanted to get involved in the high tech industry, right? I can go out and get a, a, I could go get vocational training in learning how to use open AI or NVIDIA platform, or IBM Watson's platform, I could learn those, those, uh, tools and I could perform work that the more, um, skilled I get, I could keep rising up the, the food chain of, of jobs in the gen AI space. Likewise, if I wasn't inclined to go to college and I wanted to become an electrician, you know, that is a highly skilled job today that there are not enough electricians in the market to do all the electrical work necessary to fuel the AI community, right?

So if you think about the, the increase in in size and scope of our electrical grid that's gonna be needed to, um, be upgraded in order to handle all of this AI growth, there's gonna be a, a ton of jobs that are gonna be created both vocationally in the, in the construction related trades and, um, vocational training for generative AI and AI tools. And then as you go up the food chain in terms of jobs that would require computer science training or would require an a, you know, advanced AI training or applied mathematics training, right? Then, you know, those jobs could be consumed with people who are interested in pers pursuing, um, you know, um, college and, and, and, and graduate school, uh, degrees, right?

So, so there's a, you know, wide range of jobs that are gonna be created that can, you know, power this, this AI driven economy. Those are such great points to bring up, and I think you may be one of the first ones to talk about it, creating other jobs outside of just like near ai, the fact that there are all those other components. So, and I was just recently reading about, um, the data centers and, and the amount of electricity that's needed there, and how, uh, even my city is getting some new data centers coming here because the big cities can no longer support, they don't have enough electricity.

So that is opening a lot of data centers around in different, different parts of the country and the world. I mean, I think it's gonna look, I think it will create a huge amount of jobs that are, you know, traditional manufacturing related con construction related electrical, plumbing, you know, all this sort of construction trade related jobs. It will create this, this new class of jobs for folks that can, like I said, earn a middle class living, have a cool coming edge job.

Like you could be part of the, the AI revolution, and you don't have to go to Princeton or MIT to figure it out, right? You can go and get a, a set of very, very practical skill training, and then you can evolve into that. You know, a lot of the people that were at the early stages of the computer, um, you know, the pc, um, um, wave in the, in the late 1970s and early 1980s also didn't have college degrees.

They were a class of, of tinkerers and hobbyists, right? In, in electrical engineering, you know, men and women who would, you know, were technically inclined and who would play with circuit boards and do things, you know, as a hobby, they evolved into an entire class of people that were the early computer science, um, folks, right? And those were in addition to the people that were more classically trained at the university.

But you know, like in any new industry, people who are willing to self-educate themselves and to be lifelong learners right, can learn the skill. It's not very hard, right? You can learn it by focusing and taking classes online.

I mean, one of the things that has happened since the first wave of the tech evolution is, you know, previously in the eighties and nineties, you didn't have the internet, so you couldn't take courses online, Amanda, you couldn't get free training, you know, online today, you can take courses at Harvard and MIT, you can take courses anywhere. Um, of course zero offers courses that are relatively inexpensive. You can take these, you know, these, this training, educate yourself and go out and apply it at a time where there's a market gap for this, for the skill that you have self-educated yourself on.

Right? So I think that, you know, as we look to building up a, you know, a set of middle class jobs for younger people, they, you know, they, they, this will be the replacement, I believe, for a lot of the manufacturing jobs that have been offshore over the last several, um, decades. Right?

So, so I think it's a really, you know, great opportunity. Absolutely. We're in an age where we can get so many opportunities for education at our fingertips.

I consider myself a certification junkie of sorts. Mm-hmm. And you mentioned, you mentioned, um, Harvard, they have free classes.

I I enrolled in one of their free classes a while back. Mm-hmm. So it, it's amazing all the opportunities that are there.

And also it makes me wonder, so as these jobs shift and the, the companies replace certain, uh, tasks with ai mm-hmm. Do you think that these companies should incorporate some sort of skill up programs where they cover the costs for their employees to skill up, um, in areas that are needed so they can keep those employees and shift them to other departments or tasks? Absolutely.

We do that today at interra. We take people who are, you know, we people who have a certain skill and they wanna evolve that skill into something else. We will invest in the employee to become, you know, trained in a, in an adjacent skill area.

Also, people are just curious if they wanna do that. You know, you know, companies will and should encourage people to upskill them themselves, right? And I think companies themselves will create internal certification programs, right?

So let's say for example, you are a data database engineer and you're really interested in gen ai, right? You rather than lose a known good performer, you because that person wants to do something else. It is, it invariably less expensive to retrain that person into a job that, that, that they are super interested in, right?

Because they will then think, wow, the company invested in me to get this new skill. I'm working on stuff that I'm aspirational to work on. I get the skill that I'm excited about.

I'm gonna do a great job. 'cause I'm all psyched up about what I'm working on, right? And so I, so I think it's a win-win, but I also think it's a way for companies to build the, you know, to build a huge amount of loyalty with their employee base.

Wonderful. Well, if there was one key takeaway you could leave our audience with today, what would that be? I really think that you should not, people should not be afraid of a, of ai.

Mean, look, there could be very potentially difficult things with AI when artificial and general intelligence starts to take off. And we don't know exactly how that's gonna work. No, people don't know all the rules of the road.

We don't know how to potentially regulate it effectively, right? But ai, like any other technological, um, fundamental technological evolution, right, has the potential. And it will, in my opinion, fundamentally change the way that everything is, is, is done.

Like, it'll change the way corporations operate. It'll change the way that governmental agencies operate. And my net takeaway is don't be afraid of it.

It will be a net job creator. Don't worry about it eliminating all these jobs, and we're gonna have, you know, robots doing all the work and pe it'll, it's gonna be a net job creator and po potentially a huge boom for the economy. All right.

Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your insights with us today. Thank you. And thanks to our audience.

Stay tuned. There's more.