By now, you must have definitely come across a blog or a newspaper article or a social media post that says artificial intelligence (AI) is going to take away our jobs. As the popularity of AI boomed, the fear of losing jobs loomed large on people across sectors and industries. The fear has heightened to a point that there are now websites that will tell you if your job is at risk of being taken over by AI. Here! Check it for yourself.
Is there reason to be so concerned? Anton van den Hengel, Chief Investigator of the Australian Center for Robotic Vision, opines differently. “AI systems are really, very, very stupid,” he says. “They can’t do what a toddler can do. You still can’t ask one to bring you a spoon.”
Seconding him is Sean Chou, former CEO of AI startup, Catalytic. Chou claims that robots are getting smarter and achieving newer feats every day, but they are not smart enough to entirely replace humans yet. So, what is the fear and panic about?
While the fear was still just bubbling, the Future of Jobs 2023 was published. This report states that 42% of business tasks will be automated by 2027. But a deeper reading of the report tells a different story.
The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Jobs
The same report also states that 50% of organizations are expecting generative artificial intelligence to create jobs while 25% are expecting it to cut down jobs.
Senior tech executives from the Forbes Technology Council have identified the fields which are most at risk to lose jobs to AI. It was found that all these at-risk jobs include tasks that can be learned easily.
Prominent among the fields they identified are manufacturing and warehouse positions, long-haul trucking, research and data entry, customer service, some insurance jobs, security positions and more. Even in these industries, the transition to automation is gradual.
Workers in creative art-based jobs like content creation, content writing, graphic design, video creation, film generation are at risk if they don’t adapt to the shift and start using gen AI tools in their day-to-day work. In jobs like these, which require a high level of creativity, AI can be a very helpful teammate. AI can help with brainstorming, generating ideas and first drafts which can be later refined by them. Thus, it reduces the time taken in creation and allows them to publish quality content faster.
Any job that requires a high level of emotional intelligence is difficult to be taken over by AI. This is because it is difficult to train AI systems on emotions and feelings which are not quantifiable. This is why teachers, lawyers, psychiatrists are at very low risk of losing their jobs to artificial intelligence systems.
The fear of AI taking away jobs is mitigated just by looking at the number of people employed in developing and running the AI. Engineers, scientists and researchers are just the broad categories of people who maintain AI systems. A New York Times story states, “A.I. researchers hope they can build systems that can learn from smaller amounts of data. But for the foreseeable future, human labor is essential.” Machine learning engineers, Natural Language Processing engineers, robotics engineer, data scientist, research scientist are just some of the professions that contribute to developing AI systems.
Using Artificial Intelligence at Work
Avinash Benki, Senior NLP Engineer at Gnani.ai is relieved to be able to use AI professionally. “We, engineers, use code to tackle a variety of problems on a daily basis. Without AI, I had to do copious amounts of research to find solutions to a problem. This made me slower. Now, with ChatGPT, I can just hit a few keys and find a list of solutions best suited to the issue I am dealing with on that day.” He adds, “This is especially helpful for early career engineers who do not have access to experienced people to guide them.”
Sharath KR, Solutions Architect at Gnani.ai, has found that AI has made him more efficient in his routine tasks. “I have to write a lot of emails and documentations. Preparing these would take up a substantial chunk of workday. Since I started using ChatGPT, things have become much faster for me. I even generated some cold email strategies using ChatGPT the other day. The best part is that I can even write some code with the help of ChatGPT. I have stopped bugging my coder colleagues since.”
Conclusion
While anything new comes with its own apprehensions and more so when it threatens people’s livelihoods, the best way to tackle this anxiety is to assimilate with it and see how it can be used for good. In most cases, using AI will help certain aspects of your task no matter what your profession is. It is time to stop fearing it and start embracing artificial intelligence.
Reach out to Gnani.ai and experience all that we are doing to embrace the generative AI shift.