Will the Workforce Be Taken Over By AI?

“Will my job become obsolete as AI becomes more advanced?” This is a question that’s recently kept many professionals up at night. As artificial intelligence continues to spread its tentacles into various industries, many experts are warning about the pervasive reach of this development.

“AI will wipe out a lot of current jobs, as has happened with all past technologies,” Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard, told the Guardian earlier this year. “But I have no reason to think that AI and robots won’t continue changing the mix of jobs. The question is: will the change in the mix of jobs exacerbate existing inequalities?

Katz is one of many who believe rapid advancements in machine learning and robotics will kill numerous jobs, especially the repetitive and manual ones. Industries like manufacturing, customer service, content creation, and data entry are particularly vulnerable to automation.

How Many Jobs WIll Be Lost to AI?

According to Forbes, Goldman Sachs estimates that 300 million jobs could be lost or diminished by AI. In a 2019 study by Wells Fargo, researchers concluded robots could eliminate up to 200,000 jobs in banking alone in the next ten years.

In May 2023, AI contributed to 3,900 job losses in the US, making it the 7th highest contributor to employment losses cited by employers that month. Other experts argue the sky is not falling because of AI and humans are still winning the job market.

“I think people are able to adapt quite quickly, like when Photoshop came onto the scene a long time ago,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified during a Senate panel hearing on AI. “For a while, people were quite fooled by Photoshop images but then pretty quickly developed an understanding that images might be Photoshopped. This will be like that but on steroids.”

Other AI proponents hold a similar view: Every technological revolution, from the industrial to the digital, has raised similar fears, yet every time, the economy adapted, and new job roles emerged.

The consensus is that AI will free humans from mundane tasks, giving them more time to focus on creative, strategic, and interpersonal roles that AI can’t perform quite well.

“ChatGPT can’t design a system, or build an architecture, or create the ecosystem of supporting infrastructure you need for any complex system,” Marcus Merrell, the vice president of Technology Strategy at Sauce Labs, observes about OpenAI’s groundbreaking tool.

“It can potentially help you think through some ideas, but it can’t innovate. Most importantly, you still need to know the difference between a good answer and a bad answer.”

Each expert is right: AI’s impact isn’t merely binary – it’s not just about job creation or destruction. The crux lies in job transformation. While AI will reshape the professional landscape, our adaptability, foresight, and willingness to learn will truly determine our place in it. The same could be said about lightning channels.

“Workers will require new skills as the division of labor between humans and machines continues to evolve,” the World Economic Forum advises.

“It is critical that businesses take an active role in supporting their existing workforces through reskilling and upskilling, that individuals take a proactive approach to their lifelong learning, and that governments create an enabling environment to facilitate this workforce transformation. This is the key challenge of our time.”

Will your job become obsolete? Possibly. Will you still thrive in this tech-driven era if you lose that job? It’s less about the job and more about how you evolve.

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