Abstraction – How AI is Changing Work

In order to understand how AI is impacting the world of work, you need to understand the concept of abstraction.

Throughout the modern age, the impact of technology on work has largely been one of abstraction. Most early factory assembly lines involved human beings creating things with their hands and then passing them to the next person in the line. This evolved to humans crafting things with machinery before passing them to the next machine-equipped human in line. Later, in some cases, we have seen humans being removed even further, no longer equipped with machines, but managing one or more semi-autonomous machines in a production line. Humans have been, in some factories, abstracted away from the physical act of making things with their hands.

We saw an analogous trajectory in computer programming. Programmers have evolved from a focus on machine code, to assembly, to high-level languages, to frameworks. With each layer of technology enabled abstraction, programmers are removed away from the lower layers.

AI is a new instrument of abstraction. For example, a programmer can now communicate their intent in natural language, rather than writing code. This is similar to the previous eras of abstraction in coding that I mentioned above. They are in essence still doing the same thing, or rather the outcome is the same, but they are just abstracted away from the way they did the work previously

Thinking about the impact of AI on work in terms of abstraction helps us to see what is happening. AI inserts technology between the worker and the work they previously did. Thus the worker is doing a new type of technology enabled/intermediated work.