I have seen so many articles, tweets, posts, etc. in the past few months about AI eradicating all jobs or something along the line, and robots eliminating all needs for human labour.
And then I look at all the jobs that I have worked on.
Good luck using AI to get through government bureaucracies. I am sure ChatGPT get help you navigate all the regulations, apply to all the licenses automatically, comply with regulations etc. I am sure when a company is fined millions they can just say “but…ChatGPT say this can work!”
Good luck telling the CEO to use AI assistant. I am sure the 70-years-old CEO would prefer shouting to a phone which may tell them the idea does not work instead of shouting to a group of employees who would nod nervously and then implement the ideas while ignoring the bad parts.
Good luck replacing humans with robots. The maintenance costs of hardware and software on an army of robots which needs fuel and electricity and probably internet connection MUST BE lower than hiring labour at minimum wages. Right? Did I forgot to mention that human can takes care of themselves?
Remember that the society is run by humans. Even the rich and the powerful are human and have human needs. They would want other people to work for them.
What if a singularity AI took over the world? I mean if that is possible and the society fail to prevent such an event from happening then humanity deserves to perish anyways. Also please don’t tell me you believe in Roko’s basilisk.
Stop worrying and start living your life!
LOL. CEOs aren’t going to be using AI for themselves; they have the money to hire teams of people (who will use, but vet, AI output) and provide specialized, boutique assistance. Instead, they will be forcing you and I to use AI because it costs them less money to serve us.
Robots and AI are orders of magnitude cheaper to run than humans, and have been for decades. ATMs are robots. Earthmoving equipment is robots. Computer software is a type of robot - from word processing to CAD to calculators. Mostly human controlled - as will the foreseeable future robots - but requiring fewer and fewer humans to do a set amount of labor (physical or mental).
What is the biggest push right now? Automated driving. What is the largest job sector in a majority of the US states? Delivery driver. There are fears of automated drivers missing edge cases and hitting pedestrians and (clutch your pearls) children. Over 40,000 people and over 1000 children were killed in the US by human drivers just last year. 3 Adults and 3 children were killed in Ohio just this week when a tractor trailer plowed into two passenger vehicles and a school bus because the driver wasn’t paying attention. The simplest impact detection “robot” could have prevented that. AI is already better, on average, than humans - it’s only our sense / belief in self determination that we erroneously think that we are (on average) better than a machine. And AI/ML/Automated drivers will improve with time, whereas humans are explicitly getting worse as we are offered more and more distractions in our daily lives.
AI/ML/Robots are already being implemented in the US Government (I know people who are doing it). They are coming for your job. They’re coming for my job. It’s only hubris that makes us think we are outrunning our digital competitors. The question is if we (through governments and regulation) will benefit from it or become destitute by it.
Oh I have no doubt that AI will replace a lot of jobs. What I am saying is instead of worrying about being replaced, understand that there will be jobs available and try moving to that direction.
The former makes us freeze in fear, the latter allows us to take action.
I sat in a conference room with 300+ other professionals in my field and they laughed that AI could take their jobs. I’m on the “top” of that pile of practitioners - I make my living in the niche where I’m the old expert who gets called in when nobody else can figure out a solution, or in the ordinary job to make sure it’s done right the first time. Easily 80% of my job could be replaced by AI, if my industry were a big enough cherry to pick. Luckily for them (and me) it’s not. For my industry the danger is that the AI will “solve” the problem of newly graduated professionals - the people who learn on the normal ways so that they can grow old and become the experts who understand the basics and work on the hard, unique conditions. If AI displaces the graduates so that I can increase my profits through a lower employee count, it’s really just shortchanging society 30 years down the road when we won’t have humans with hands on experience. That’s the societal danger we face if we aren’t careful. You and I can got on top of this, but if nobody behind us can there will be a gap in knowledge. (I’m re-reading Azimov’s Foundation series. It feels a lot less like the idle entertainment it did when I read it as a teenager)
That is a problem I already see in my field. Instead of asking my junior for a first draft, using ChatGPT could be faster and cheaper.
I can make adjustments because I already know the ins and outs, but I wonder what fresh graduate can do do get the experience.
Not to mention that some schools are saying they should encourage students to use AI. Please no, let them try doing things the hard way first before moving to the easy way.
This misses the key advantage of AI to businesses: lower total overhead through AI. You’re acting as though every job lost to AI will be replaced with another job opening somewhere else, but that hasn’t been true for efficiency automation historically (sorry horses), unless you’re talking about jobs that aren’t in the same field, in which case you’re just pulling a “learn to code”.
There will be people who have 10+, 20+ years of experience whose jobs will be lost, and they can’t just start over from square 1 in their careers.
Thanks, LinkedIn.
Just to make the point about the Ohio crash more clear…it was a charter bus full of high school students. Not a typical school bus. Plus other cars were involved too. Such a horrible event.