The Robots Are Not Taking Over

By Jupiter Maxw iamjoopiter222@gmail.com

In November 2022, the startup OpenAI debuted ChatGPT, an AI-search tool that can answer any question in a conversational dialogue format. With just under two months since its release, ChatGPT has already been used by students to cheat on essays and written work, to converse with employers and apply for jobs, to chat with potential partners on dating apps, and has even been cited as the author on research papers.

This has reignited the fears held by many workers that there is an impending takeover of artificial intelligence in the workplace, with the potential to mitigate the need for human workers altogether in some fields. ChatGPT is undoubtedly a mindblowing piece of technology, but it leaves much to be desired in terms of eloquence, empathy, reliability, and autonomy.

Since the Industrial Revolution, automation has gradually eliminated a substantial chunk of blue-collar jobs, but it will be a long time before AI is able to completely supplant human workers. Many professionals and researchers believe that AI will end up creating more jobs and may actually increase productivity in the workplace.

According to the World

Economic Forum’s The Future of Jobs Report 2020, it’s predicted that I will replace 85 million jobs worldwide by 2025, but it will create 97 million new jobs. “The number of people that are necessary to deliver better and better technology grows massively,” said Sean Chou, the CEO of the AI startup Catalytic. “When you look at AI, there's this nonstop need for training, for data, for maintenance, for taking care of all the exceptions that are happening. How do we monitor AI? How do we train it? Those are all going to become new jobs.”

Indeed, humans and human jobs will be needed to continue the advancement of AI, and to implement it in workplaces that deem it necessary. But this implementation should not necessarily be seen as a bad thing. One of the primary roles of AI in the workplace will be to complete the repetitive tasks that may normally keep human workers from focusing on the parts of their job that simply cannot be done by a machine or a program. The human can focus on anything from customer relations to strategic planning, and the AI can work on training new employees.

Although AI still lacks the emotion and creativity deemed essential in many professions with human-to-human contact, its efficiency and novelty does create some cause for concern. And now, with ChatGPT, it is clear that AI is developing towards human function, perhaps less gradually than coverage would have you believe.

If AI can engage in conversation, it may soon be able to assist with tasks that many thought would always require humans, such as customer relations. AI now has this capability, and it will continue to develop and advance. It will be a long time before AI can perform these tasks as well as a human can, and it will certainly take some time for clients to accept customer service from a computer rather than a person.

In “Robots and AI Taking Over Jobs: What to Know About the Future of Jobs,” Mike Thomas lists professions that will always require humans; we will always need human teachers, writers, lawyers, medical professionals, social workers, and therapists. “These fields may still be aided by the advancement of AI in the future, but AI and robots can’t replicate the empathy and social intelligence that these fields require,” said Thomas. Going forward, it is important to consider AI to be a tool that can aid the workplace and increase productivity, while also creating more jobs. AI will replace some jobs, but it will create many more.