They Took Our Jobs!

The Rise of AI Tools and the Rise of Spreadsheet Software

Lately the tech world seems to be consumed with the rise of AI tools. The release of GPT-3, generative AI tools (Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and Dalle-2) and the recent drop of ChatGPT have created a sense that we are at an inflection point where these tools will pass from being academic proof-of-concept or flashy demos, to actual impelements of commercial operations. A common thread of concern is when certain classes of jobs will start to dissapear, automated away by the newly launched capabilities. What place will artists, illustrators, help desk personnel, analysts, and programmers have in a world in which everyone has access to ChatGPT and generative AI tools?

There was a similar inflection point in the early 1980s when VisiCalc, and later incarnations spreadsheeting software, came onto the scene - rapidly revolutionized the accounting, finance, and bookkeeping industries. Spreadsheets used to be computed on paper, or blackboards, by hand. When someone wanted to model how changes in their business expansion would affect their expenses, cash flows, and income they would hire someone to, by hand, build a spreadsheet.

Eventually someone launched a computerized version of the spreadsheet that auto-updated cells and automated the laborious manual tasks.

As stated by Jean-Louis Gassee, an early Apple Executive, when he first saw VisiCalc, “That was the day I realized that you didn’t have to be a programmer any more to use a computer. Visicalc was a phenomenal revolution… Approximations, trial and error, simulations — Visicalc is an intellectual modeling clay. It lets you program without knowing it.” [1]

The following excerpt is from a great Planet Money episode [2] about the rise of the electronic spreadsheet, and is worth a read in full:

GOLDSTEIN: And that magazine article from 1984 that we talked about at the top of the show, there’s this amazing little anecdote about an accountant right after the electronic spreadsheet came out. And what happened was this accountant, he got a rush job from one of his clients. It was the kind of thing that in the old paper universe would’ve taken a couple days. This guy has this new electronic spreadsheet. So he plugs in the numbers, does the work in just a couple hours. Then, what he does - he just waits, let’s the thing sit on his desk for, like, two days, FedExs it back to the client. And the client was like, wow, you did it so fast.

KESTENBAUM: It’s a funny story. But clearly, like, that was not going to be a long-term strategy, right? If it only takes a couple hours to do a spreadsheet and you’re billing by the hour, you’re going to make less money for a particular job, right? You’re going to need fewer workers. You’re going to need to get rid of some people.

GOLDSTEIN: And, in fact, if you look at the numbers - just the, you know, national jobs data from the government - you can see this. The number of accounting clerks and bookkeepers, who are the kind of people who actually do a lot of this math, those numbers have fallen over the past several decades. A lot of people got replaced by software.

KESTENBAUM: Dan Bricklin says he thought about this when he was inventing the spreadsheet.

BRICKLIN: That was an issue I had to come to terms with. Technology is a double-edged sword. I produce general-purpose tools that can be used for all sorts of things. Some are good, and some are bad. Some will cause people to lose their job. Some makes new jobs possible.

KESTENBAUM: He was right. The spreadsheet both killed jobs and it created jobs. While the number of bookkeepers and accounting clerks fell, the electronic spreadsheet actually meant more jobs for regular accountants.

GOLDSTEIN: A few numbers - since 1980, right around the time the electronic spreadsheet came out, 400,000 bookkeeping and accounting clerk jobs have gone away. But 600,000 accounting jobs have been added.

KESTENBAUM: What happened is that accounting basically became cheaper. And sometimes, when something gets cheaper, people buy a lot more of that thing. Alan said clients bought more accounting. They called up asking him to run more numbers for them.

SNYDER: You could play the what-if game. You know, what if I did this instead of that?

KESTENBAUM: If you’re that person who owned the chocolate factory, you could now call up Alan Snyder and ask all kinds of questions. What if we made our chocolate bars a little bit smaller? What if we made them 2 percent larger? Can we give everyone a raise this year? What if we started selling a lot of chocolate bars to China? All these questions, normally, it would’ve been very expensive for Alan Snyder to do it out on paper. But now it was much cheaper. So people asked a lot more questions.

I suspect that we will see a similar pattern of development and changes with these new AI tools. They will amplify the capabilities of their user, lower the barrier to entry into the professions, and increase the overall use of the skillset. People will absolutely lose jobs and the industries touched by AI will be changed forever, but it’s not a zero-sum outcome.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220901003334/http://www.bricklin.com/firstspreadsheetquestion.htm

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20221129231402/https://www.npr.org/transcripts/528807590