This post was originally published on this site.
This column started out as creating a vision of “what’s next” for Prince William County as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and artificial intelligence unfold simultaneously.
But after researching Gartner, Accenture, MIT and other sources, I realized the future may be pretty bleak. This isn’t the column I wanted to write.
Accenture summed the future up best: “Generative AI is likely the most significant change to work since the agricultural and industrial revolutions.” We are now in the AI revolution. AI changes everything.
A knowledge worker is a person whose job involves handling or using information. They are the cogs in the machinery of the federal government. DOGE intends to create a new cohort of trained, educated and unemployed knowledge workers. The expectation is that they will find commercial employment leveraging those skills in the private sector. They may not.
Elon Musk expects AI to replace all human jobs. Not everyone agrees with that sweeping generalization. But no one who really follows and understands AI doubts the impact will be significant. AI is moving much faster than anyone anticipated.
Contractors, or “Beltway bandits” (for the record, I was one of those), supply knowledge workers to pretty much every branch of government. These companies will be hit hard if they don’t adapt and evolve.
Any business that isn’t actively looking at how to exploit and profit from AI’s impact in both the government and private sector will probably be out of business quickly. I suspect a new cohort of “luddites” will rise from the rhetorical ashes to fight the AI revolution. They will lose.
Among those many knowledge workers who are going to be laid off are probably a few entrepreneurs. Some of those entrepreneurs will figure out how to organize their peers to exploit the move to AI. If you have a good idea on how to develop AI applications, exploit their use and adapt their functionality, you’ll probably do really well. Bear in mind all of the things I’m talking about will probably eventually be taken over by AI. That’s ironic.
Continual learning is the key to surviving in an AI world. Public schools, community colleges, universities and pretty much every institution of higher education need to start AI programs. Ironically, education is one of those things that could be heavily impacted – perhaps replaced – by AI. AI is moving so fast that what one learns as a freshman might be outdated by the time they enter their sophomore year of college.
We are experiencing an unusual period of chaos around the philosophy of exactly how big government should be and what it means to govern and trying to get there as swiftly as possible. My former life was math. Usually, such problems are modeled to propose the best alternatives to achieve the goal and identify unintended consequences. Models are driven by the variables introduced into the math.
It appears the short- and long-term impact of the AI revolution was left out of the model. In my opinion, that means the entire premise for the current efforts of DOGE and reducing the size and functions of the federal government are flawed. If they mess this up, the economies of Prince William, the United States and perhaps the world will suffer. I dread another major depression because the unintended consequences of the AI revolution were not fully evaluated.
This is bigger than just the government and the companies that support it. AI changes everything. We aren’t really sure what’s next. Some will be part of the AI revolution. Others will be its casualties. And there will be lots of casualties.
Al Alborn is an award-winning columnist and member of the Virginia Press Association. You can learn more about Al at alborn.net.