9 minute read
lf AI Doesn't Take Your Job, It'll Change It. A Lot.
from April 2023
THE NEW REALITY will favor those able and willing to collaborate effectively with AI
by James Melton
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AI is here. How soon it transforms the economy depends on how fast the technology advances. But experts agree the transition to the “jobs of tomorrow” is already underway.
In late 2022, ChatGPT, an AI chatbot developed by San Francisco-based OpenAI, introduced the public to the potential of generative artificial intelligence. That’s the kind of AI engineers can train to generate new outputs, like sonnets, graphics or awkwardly written term papers.
Soon, experts say generative and other forms of AI will create millions of jobs and destroy millions of others. If forecasts prove correct, we’re facing an economic realignment as intense as the industrial revolution–only faster.
In a 2020 report, the World Economic Forum (WEF) predicted AI would create 97 million new jobs across 26 countries by 2025, while destroying 85 million jobs. That would be a net gain in total employment. But it’s virtually certain the transition will leave some people behind. Millions of others will need to retrain and pick up new skills.
Harry Holzer, an economist and professor of public policy at Georgetown University, put it in stark terms: “There’s a chunk of people who never get reemployed again,” he told Luckbox.
Below are examples of how AI could affect selected industries and occupations as it marches across the economy.
Knowledge workers at risk
Waves of tech advancement have disrupted economies for hundreds of years. Typically, those displaced are primarily low-skilled workers who see their tedious jobs taken over by machines.
But this time, it’s different, according to Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI. Speaking last September at an event hosted by venture capital firm Greylock Partners, Altman made it clear that generative AI systems like ChatGPT are coming for creative and other skilled, white-collar jobs first.
“If you asked people 10 years ago about how AI was going to have an impact, with a lot of confidence from most people you would’ve heard, ‘first, it’s going to come for the blue-collar jobs—working in the factories, truck drivers, whatever. Then it will come for the low-skill white-collar jobs—then the very high-skill, really high-IQ white-collar jobs, like a programmer or whatever. And then very last of all, and maybe never, it’s going to take the creative jobs,’” Altman said. “And it’s going exactly the other direction.” Does that mean artists, lawyers, doctors and (heaven forbid) journalists will soon be out of work? Probably not, Holzer says. But he thinks jobs like that will change dramatically. The new reality will favor those able and willing to collaborate effectively with AI and use the time saved to expand the scope of their jobs, he said.
Software and coding
Earlier this year, Google (GOOGL) tested various AI-powered chatbots. It determined ChatGPT, from rival OpenAI, qualified for a job as a level-three software engineer, according to reports by MSNBC and PC Magazine.
Based on job listings posted on Google’s recruiting website, that position pays about $180,000 per year. And AI doesn’t need health insurance.
The coding prowess of AI was evident even before ChatGPT was released. In August 2022, accounting and consulting firm Deloitte reported that an unnamed AI supercomputer placed in the top 54.3% of coders, based on its performance across 10 coding competitions hosted in 2021 and 2022, each with more than 5,000 participants.
That’s possibly bad news for software writers but good news for software companies facing a talent crunch. Among other things, Deloitte says AI could benefit “software companies struggling to recruit sufficient software development professionals” by partially automating “low-level coding projects,” lowering costs.
That automation could happen sooner than most people realize. In late January, the news website Semafor reported that OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has hired contractors “who are creating data for OpenAI’s models to learn software engineering tasks.”
OpenAI previously trained ChatGPT to write code using data collected from GitHub website, an internet hosting service for software development owned by Microsoft (MSFT). “But in this case, OpenAI appears to be building a dataset that includes not just lines of code but also the human explanations behind them written in natural language,” Semafor reported.
However, Microsoft—OpenAI’s largest investor— insists it sees human creative input as vital to the software development process even though software developers already use generative AI to write around 80% of their code.
At the 2023 World Economic Forum, held in Davos, Switzerland, in January, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said: “It just so happens that now [the developer] has 80% leverage in doing what he’s doing. He’s still the pilot, but he does have a co-pilot,” Nadella said.
Manufacturing jobs and Industry 4.0
Among companies that make stuff, AI is part of a sweeping agenda called the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or Industry 4.0, in which intelligent computers will bring a fourth revolution to manufacturing, just as steam and waterpower, electricity and digital automation, respectively, powered the first three.
In a 2022 report, the Manufacturing Leadership Council, part of the National Association of Manufacturers, called AI “the most potentially significant technology for manufacturing’s future.” Its uses, the group says, will include “software applications used on the factory floor, to robotic systems used to help assemble products as well as move materials, to systems used in the design, simulation, customer interactions, supply chain and logistics, and many others.”
The economic potential is enormous. An article published online last summer by McKinsey & Co. said manufacturing—if effectively transformed by AI and machine learning—could add $275 billion to $460 billion to U.S. gross domestic product by 2030 and create up to 1.5 million jobs.
Separate McKinsey data says manufacturers could use the current technology to automate up to 58% of manufacturing “work activities.” And, while manufacturing workers spent 48% of their time on physical and manual tasks in 2016, that will drop to 35% by 2030. That means manufacturing jobs will differ from the factory jobs our parents and grandparents had—or even those available today.
The use of AI in manufacturing goes beyond its impact on factory workers. According to the research firm Gartner, generative AI already enables sectors like automotive, aerospace and defense “to design parts that are optimized to meet specific goals and constraints, such as performance, materials and manufacturing methods.”
Media and journalism
In journalism, news organizations like the Associated Press already use AI tools to automate parts of the writing and editing process. But newsrooms can trust AI only so far.
CNET, a news website that covers technology and consumer electronics, found out the hard way that AI needs–at the very least—careful fact-checking. In November 2022, the team that runs the site’s
Money section experimented with using an “internally designed AI engine” to write and publish 77 stories. Even though humans conceived the story outlines and edited the stories, CNET identified numerous errors in the AI-assisted articles. In January, CNET paused its use of the AI engine.
CNET’s fumble didn’t stop Buzzfeed (BZFD)— which owns several news and entertainment websites—from announcing plans to incorporate AI into its coverage over the next three years. The announcement caused a brief rally in Buzzfeed stock, which has since leveled off.
Lawyers and law firms
Language-model AI tools can help attorneys automate functions like writing drafts of contracts and briefs and, to some degree at least, conduct legal research, said Sharon Nelson, an attorney and president of Sensei Enterprises, a digital forensics, cybersecurity and information technology firm.
“I think AI is going to replace lawyers at the lower end of things,” Nelson told Luckbox . “You know, why do you need somebody to do research for you when you have AI to do it for you? So, you don’t necessarily need some of the lower functions. The people who are in danger in my mind are the paralegals and maybe the lower level of associate.”
When ChatGPT was released, the U.S. legal profession was already using AI in a big way.
According to Business Insider, large firms using AI include New York-based Shearman & Sterling; White & Case, headquartered in Chicago; and San Francisco-based Orrick. They aren’t alone. In a 2021 survey of business leaders by analytics firm RELX, 72% of legal industry executives said their businesses were already using AI.
The transition to AI-powered lawyering doesn’t have to be a threat, says Andrew Perlman, dean of the Suffolk University Law School.
“It’s very hard to say what the impact is going to be on lawyer jobs,” Perlman said. “I think it’s easier to predict that it is going to change how lawyers do their jobs.”
He said tools like ChatGPT make lawyers more productive by taking over routine tasks like writing first drafts of emails and legal documents.
Does the uncertainty make this an opportune time to drop out of law school? Absolutely not, Perlman
said. (And yes, as a law school dean, he has a bias.)
“If you want to be part of a profession that’s going through significant change and be a part of its future, this is the moment,” he said.
Winners and losers
“There are two groups of workers who will be losers in this process,” Georgetown’s Holzer told Luckbox. “One is people who are displaced, especially the people … who will be displaced and who will have difficulty getting retrained for something else. That’s usually somewhat older workers and less-educated workers.”
The second group likely to lose out, he said, are those who aren’t directly put out of work but become less valuable as AI takes over tasks they used to perform. He says the automatable parts of an individual job “might be 20% of a person’s tasks or 40% or 60%. The higher the percentage of the tasks that are replaced, the more likely they are to become unemployed.”
As AI changes how people do their job, he added: “People will have to adapt and pick up a new set of tasks if they want to stay in the same line of work.”
In other words, AI might not take your job (at least not right away), but you can expect it to change how you do it dramatically. As AI takes over tasks, Holzer says, the new reality favors those able to take on new ones and reengineer their jobs to collaborate with AI.
As always, the future will belong to the most adaptable.
