Evidence That AI Might Not Quite Replace Your Job

From studies showing that AI, so far, isn’t taking over your job, to $100 robots and everything in between—here is your weekend read.

May 02, 2025

Dear Friend,

Here’s a weekend treat for you: We made a bunch of our resources free for you to download—from our Disruption Mapping toolkit (which includes an explainer video and PDF facilitation guide for you to run your own Disruption Mapping exercises), to our Fieldguides on Better Decision-Making with MAPs, the Common Agreement, and our Polarity Mapping Facilitation Guide. Keep an eye on our Free Resource section—we will expand this in the future with more of our tools.

Happy downloading & happy reading…

Headlines from the Future

Hugging Face Releases a 3D-Printed Robotic Arm Starting at $100 ↗

The AI revolution is powering the robotics revolution—and now you can play!

Hugging Face, the “GitHub for AI models,” just announced a programmable, 3D-printable robotic arm that can pick up and place objects, starting at a mere $100. The arm features improved motors that reduce friction while allowing the arm to sustain its own weight and can be trained via an AI technique called reinforcement learning.

Time to get the order in and start playing…

Link to article and instructions.

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Generative AI Is Not Replacing Jobs or Hurting Wages at All, Say Economists ↗

A new study by the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago shows that the use of GenAI, at least so far, hasn’t had any measurable impact on jobs and wages:

> “AI chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation,” the authors state in their paper.

One might consider this a reason for celebration (“no, AI won’t make you unemployed”), but it has a very important implication:

> “The adoption of these chatbots has been remarkably fast,” Humlum told The Register. “Most workers in the exposed occupations have now adopted these chatbots. Employers are also shifting gears and actively encouraging it. But then when we look at the economic outcomes, it really has not moved the needle.”

Despite the billions of dollars being poured into AI, the economic impact (again, so far) seems to have been minimal…

Link to article and study.

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A Weird Phrase Is Plaguing Scientific Papers and AI Training Data ↗

Ever heard of “vegetative electron microscopy”? It is a term that has been popping up in AI responses throughout the earlier part of the year—one that is completely nonsensical, originating from a translation error dating back to the 1950s. Alas, AI doesn’t know anything—it’s all tokens to AI, and thus we now see the term appearing in AIs—something called “digital fossils.”

> Like biological fossils trapped in rock, these digital artefacts may become permanent fixtures in our information ecosystem. […] Digital fossils reveal not just the technical challenge of monitoring massive datasets, but the fundamental challenge of maintaining reliable knowledge in systems where errors can become self-perpetuating.

Link to article here and here.

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AI Isn’t Ready to Do Your Job ↗

The subhead of this Business Insider piece says it all:

> Carnegie Mellon staffed a fake company with AI agents. It was a total disaster.

Some more gems:

> It’s relatively easy to teach them to be nice conversational partners; it’s harder to teach them to do everything a human employee can.

And in conclusion:

> Instead of being replaced by robots, we’re all slowly turning into cyborgs.

As always in (tech) life: All that glitters is not gold. (for now at least)

What We Are Reading

🚢 What BYD’s Massive New Ship Reveals About Its Business Move over Tesla! BYD – China’s EV juggernaut – has just unleashed the ocean-dominating BYD Shenzhen, a maritime colossus that gulps down 9,200 vehicles at once, powering its unstoppable global takeover! Retry Claude can make mistakes. Please double-check responses. @Jane

🥩 Americans Are Obsessed With Protein and It’s Driving Nutrition Experts Nuts Americans’ obsession with protein has intensified, driving a surge in high-protein snacks, drinks, and supplements marketed as health foods—even as experts warn that many of these ultra-processed products offer little real nutritional benefit compared to whole foods like chicken or eggs. @Mafe

🤖 Welcome to the Future If a future we had envisioned has finally arrived, it looks a whole lot like cyberpunk. @Jeffrey

🧑🏼‍🎓 How AI, Funding Cuts and Shifting Skills Are Redefining Education — and What It Means for the Future of Work As AI rapidly transforms education and the way we learn, institutions must shift from traditional methods to fostering critical thinking and AI fluency, preparing students not just to use AI but to think with it. @Kacee

🛍️ OpenAI Adds Shopping to ChatGPT in a Challenge to Google ChatGPT’s demo of a shopping feature hinted at a much more organic online shopping experience. OpenAI wants to combine the smart memory of your digital companion with your specific search instructions to always find the best products for you. If it is based on scraping reviews and displaying unsponsored products, it will be interesting to see how affiliate revenue models will adjust. @Julian

📖 Duolingo’s CEO Lays Out 5 Ways AI Will Be Used to Decide the Future of Its Workforce Duolingo will start to phase out contractors for work that can be handled by AI to overcome human limitations in creating the “massive amount of content” the company needs to scale. @Pedro

🌀 The Gruen Transfer Is Consuming the Internet The Gruen Transfer—that pesky moment when a shopper enters a store with a clear plan but becomes distracted by the store’s layout and marketing, causing them to lose track of their original intentions—is happening on the Internet and makes the Web we love, the Web we loath. @Pascal