Artificial Intelligence: it’s a pretty big buzzword right now. Funnily enough, we’ve actually had ‘AI’ for decades, but it’s only recently caused a big stir because of the sudden rise in so-called ‘Large Language Models’, like OpenAI’s Chat-GPT, that can generate text — and by extension, their variants that can code, create images, and basically do everything that Humans can. AI is (in my opinion) a massive misnomer. We’re not really close at all to true ‘intelligence’ — neural nets are possibly the closest, but in the end that’s a philosophical question anyway, if we ourselves are just chemicals. I’ll leave that for another day! I’ll also leave the general ethical considerations alone, like AI art or energy — I’ll mainly consider jobs.
Understandably, this new AI is causing some panic. Despite it’s problems (you might have seen that Google’s AI has been telling users to eat rocks: there are plenty other examples) it still has massive power. While I’m not on the ‘it’s all going to be fine!’ side, I think having as much information as possible is vital to forming your own opinions. So, pray read on for an exploration into AI, what it’s going to change, and how worried you’ve got to be. I’ve done this in a way that is hopefully neither scaremongering nor excessive optimism — because to me most articles are too skewed in one favour.
DISCLAIMER: I do finish on a relatively positive note, so if you do want some optimism, continue reading! I do that because I come to an overall conclusion from current evidence — maybe it’ll change, maybe not.
First of all, it’s worth noting two things: firstly, as mentioned, we’ve had AI for ages. It’s been used in everything from identification of birds to population modelling. This is ‘image recognition’ — a subset of AI, although some would say that’s up to debate. Nowadays it’s hard to move 2 feet without hearing about some new AI — my favourite is Oral-B’s AI toothbrush (yes, you read that right: it flabbergasted me too). The main reason that this is, is basically because everyone knows it. With all the media-coverage, anything with AI is an eyebrow-raiser for anyone, from luddites to technophilics. So, the reason you’re seeing AI everywhere is because most businesses have decided it’s a good idea to get people interested.
Secondly, we’ve always had change. A few decades ago mobile phones had briefcase-batteries, and the internet was non-existent: now nearly everyone has smart-phones, and a company without a website is the equivalent of seeing someone with a pudding-bowl haircut — not zero, but still pretty low. Go back a bit further and we had thousands of jobs in the telephone-operator sector, which has now completely vanished. However horrifying it is, we’ve always seen change, and sadly it’s rare that this doesn’t cause damage.
All the same, AI is change on a possibly never-seen-before scale: let’s be fair, there’s a reason some of the biggest tech-leaders signed that letter to encourage AI-development to be halted, and why governments are looking at legislation. AI has capabilities everywhere: customer service, programming, literature. Sure, it does fail half the time — but all it’s going to do is improve. It’s possible that Humans will only be needed to step in when needed, to oversee AI, and debug code written by the aforementioned. Like machination, a lot of Humans just won’t be needed anymore.
An argument I often see to counter that, is that AI will create a lot of new jobs. I reply, ‘like what?’. I haven’t had an answer yet that won’t also be replaced by AI.
In short, AI is scary, and unless we see speedy steps forward with legislation, it will cause major changes in many industries. But, I still wouldn’t let that worry you, for several reasons.
The first is that, put brusquely, if people start losing their jobs left right and centre we’ll see riots that put a stop to that pretty quickly. If there are no other jobs to get into, it just won’t stand. Governments will be forced into acting, even if companies don’t want to. This could be new laws or even just minimum living wages.
Secondly, AI is still a tool. Despite it’s capability of giving one Human the power of 10, for all we know this might just speed up development: rather than decimating their employees, companies might just progress 10 times faster. Because if there’s one thing AIs do need, that’s input — and only Humans can provide that satisfactorily. It would mean that employees are expected both knowledge in their field (to use the AI well) and also knowledge of the AI. Considering this, the biggest impact AI will have is on education, something I won’t delve into.
That last point of mine is one I’d like to reiterate. Skip the doomsday scenario completely, and imagine — how far we could go, without anyone being damaged. This might have to be enforced by laws, but it might just happen automatically. The major issue with AI is that it forces competitors to use it, for fear of being left behind (even if it’s useless: think about the Space Race: there wasn’t really any benefit to getting into space, but it was all about keeping your country’s respect at high levels — similarly, companies fear that they’ll look stupid without AI of their own). But then by that extension, a company with all of it’s workers using AI will be able to work much better than a company that halved its workers so they’d be replaced by AI — again, making it so the other company has to hire more. It balances out, in the long run.
Of course, this is all hypothesis — but I think it’s a reassuring idea all the same. It might still impact things like customer service, but then more jobs might open in quaternary sectors. Also, firing most of your employees is not good for morale of the rest.
Now, let’s take a step back for a second. Given this thought process, I think we can come to one main conclusion: that there will be massive changes, but that these won’t effect people as much as some are saying, because in the end everything will balance it out. Let’s give a practical example for this: a hypothetical programming company fires most of its staff, because why not when the rest can do the same amount of work with AI?
From that though, we see either scenario A or B: A in which morale falls, and some sort of riots start, forcing companies to hire more again (or for a Living Wage); or B, in which the company realizes that it can branch out into other sectors (for example, rather than making websites it also makes and maintains databases for customers), and so re-hires its staff. Competition from other companies means that this sector is over-saturated though, but then it turns out that doesn’t matter because in turn, greater usage of AI has led to more need for databases, for all that data they want! You know, I did have another point that reinforced that even more, but I forgot it after having a tea-break. Try and come up with some of your own scenarios — it fits rather neatly.
Of course, there is Scenario C where AI does become intelligent (or just follows orders wrongly) and then destroys Humanity, but that’s a different train of thought altogether — and let’s be honest, you wouldn’t be worrying about a job by that time anyway. It’s a win-win!
The reason why AI is such a problem is because (dare I say it) most companies have no morals. So maybe, AI is more of a sign for us to try and be the best we can? And just be kind? Maybe it will lead to Humanity going even further, or maybe it won’t. There’s only one way to find out ;)
With that said, thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed this relatively brief, quite philosophical but hopefully unbiased article, on what AI will do for jobs. If you did, consider leaving a like or comment! Incidentally, if you have something else to add on, leave it down there too — but try and keep any debates civil!
All in all, my main message is that we just don’t know what will happen — but it’ll work out in the end. Stay safe everyone — and stay kind, because that’s one thing AI can’t be. Until next time!
P.S. apologies for any mistakes in this! I decided to leave this un-proofread, because that’s for AI to do (I’m joking, I’m joking…). No, but in all seriousness this turned out to be more of a thought experiment than anything else, and I didn’t want to tone that down. If you liked my style of writing, feel free to subscribe or check out my other works!
