Avoiding AI Will Not Help You in the Long Run

Über-rich tech tycoons are notorious for their batty takes, which makes the analyst Benedict Evans something of a rarity. He’s a former partner at Andreessen Horowitz, which invested early in Airbnb, Facebook, and Lyft. You might recall back in 2023 when Evans’s old partner, co-founder Marc Andreessen, published that viral (and pretty extreme) Techno-Optimist Manifesto? Evans is known for taking a softer tack. He’s a careful pragmatist who periodically grabs the tech industry’s attention with his incisive reports about emerging technologies, and he’s been right enough over the past decade that he’s gained a reputation as a tech insider’s insider. His latest dispatch is called “AI eats the world,” and he followed it up with a thoughtful conversation on the Lenny’s Podcast. All of it’s worth your time — especially if you’re a skeptic — but here are five of the biggest takeaways.

[1] Reflexively loathing AI won’t help you. “Don’t stick your head in the sand and say ‘I hate all this stuff,’ ” Evans says. “That gives you a great feeling of moral superiority,” but it’s not going to help you ride out the inevitable AI job churn. Imagine you’re a young lawyer interviewing at a firm that hired 100 new associates last year but plans to hire only 50 this year. “If you go into the interview and say ‘Well, I think AI is bulls*!t, and I’m never going to use it,’ [that’s] probably not the right mood. So that may not be particularly comforting, but I don’t think there’s an alternative.”

[2] The jobs of the future always sound silly. If you told a child born in 1790 that they would grow up to be a railway engineer instead of a dirt farmer, they’d laugh and say, “That sounds dumb.” And also: “What’s a railway?” This friction, Evans says, helps to explain some of the public’s (misplaced, in his view) animus toward AI.

[3] AI adoption has been fast. The layoffs will not be. Doomers exaggerate the speed at which AI will erase jobs, Evans says, since the typical white-collar worker has a wide range of non-automatable skills. Software engineering was the first career to get hit, he says, because it was secretly “boring manual labour.” He’s also skeptical that AI startups will swiftly kill incumbent companies; he points to Frame.io, a cloud-based editing software that challenged Adobe (before Adobe acquired it in 2021). That product could have been built 10 years earlier, but it takes time for people to recognize and solve a problem within any given industry.

[4] ChatGPT and Claude are commodities. Sure, says Evans, some frontier models are better than others, but they’re still more or less interchangeable. OpenAI’s Sam Altman has even described AI in commodity-like terms. So why should anyone expect these platforms to win the AI age? Evans draws a comparison to telecom companies, which initially thought they’d dominate the cell-phone era — until software companies, like Facebook, built higher-value products on top of their infrastructure.

[5] Young people always learn to adapt. If you’re entering the job market right now, AI might present challenges — but in five or 10 years, Evans says, “things will have settled down a lot … It’s going to be a big fuzzy mess, and, yes, it will change a bunch of stuff and we’ll need to worry about it.” But welcome to the modern world, he says. “This is going to be completely different from everything else, just like everything else.”

Written By

Jared Sullivan

Jared Sullivan is an editor for Wealthsimple Magazine and author of the book "Valley So Low: One Lawyer's Fight for Justice in the Wake of America's Great Coal Catastrophe".