Navigating the Future: What Jobs Will Look Like in the Face of an Impending AI Revolution

Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing the world we live in, changing the environment and how humans interact with technology. These technical innovations have brought unprecedented advancements and opportunities, but at the same time have also put a question mark on the future of work and impact on jobs in multiple fields.

History witnessed every innovation ranging from steam engines to the internet, bringing disruption in labor markets, and eliminating jobs while creating new ones. In many ways, AI has reached the turning point where its potential is overshadowing its synergic existence with humans.

“If history is any guide, it’s almost certain that advances in AI will cause more jobs to vanish, that creative-class people with human-only skills will become richer but fewer in number, and that those who own creative technology will become the new mega-rich,” said Kentaro Toyama, Professor of Community Information, University of Michigan.

The emergence of AI and big data goes back to the early 2000s when search engines like Google and Baidu started using AI-powered recommendation algorithms for advertising. They observed that the findings improved as they gathered more data.

The advent of ImageNet, the world's largest picture recognition database created for use in research on visual object recognition, however, marked the true breakthrough. The deep learning revolution began with the creation of ImageNet by computer scientists at Stanford and Princeton Universities in the US.

The tech industry has taken another leap forward with the introduction of generative APIs like ChatGPT, a chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022. The tech became a massive hit with over 100 million active users worldwide as of January 2023.

It costs $3 million per month for OpenAI, according to some estimates, to run an AI model of this magnitude. This may be a contributing factor in the corporation's alliance with Microsoft, which provides preferential access to Microsoft Azure cloud servers in addition to investing over $10 billion in the company.

Microsoft has integrated ChatGPT into several of its offerings, including Azure, which now features OpenAI services that allow for interactions with models such as ChatGPT, GPT-3.5, DALL-E, and Codex. Additionally, Microsoft has introduced a revamped version of its Bing search engine that incorporates ChatGPT.

Keeping up with the race, Google announced it will add its latest chatbot, LaMDA, to the search engine. China’s tech giant Baidu also plans on launching its chatbot “Ernie bot” in March, claiming that it will be trained on 50% more parameters than ChatGPT and will be bilingual.

These chatbots, however, have their limitations. They may provide false information and represent them as facts, they can give biased or harmful instructions without “understanding” the gravity of these issues.

Back in November 2022, a few weeks before the introduction of ChatGPT, Meta had to take its chatbot, Galactica down after multiple people cited it for fake research results.

“Language models can learn from the data’s biases and replicate them. These biases are hard to see in text generation but very clear in image generation models. Researchers at OpenAI, creators of ChatGPT, have been relatively careful about what the model will respond to, but users routinely find ways around these guardrails,” said Daniel Acuña, Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Colorado Boulder.

The makers are trying hard to limit the anomalies since people, especially students, are using AI technology to gain information and work on their assignments. This is another big problem that schools and colleges are facing.

Students are using AI tools excessively to write their essays, and do their homework, making it difficult for schools to keep a check on the originality and creativity of students.

“The reality is that students have had an impressive array of tools at their disposal for a number of years now and ChatGPT is the latest and most sophisticated tool. In January, when ChatGPT was relatively new to most, we conducted a survey of over 500 college/university level students and 80% admitted that they had used similar tools to ChatGPT in the past when submitting work. 91% of students said they were aware of other students that had done so.”  informed Andrew Rains, Co-founder of Passed.ai.

He further added that the variety of tools, the awareness of those tools, the willingness of students to use them, and the enforceability challenges schools face have created a huge headache for academic integrity departments.

Educators have pulled up their socks and are putting in long hours to design programs that limit the involvement of AI tools in their assignments. The change, however, has to be made at a larger scale where the whole curriculum is modified in a way that makes the use of AI technology a pursuit that promotes creativity.

“There are many ways in which schools can equip students to effectively engage with AI going forward. One option is to take a multidisciplinary approach; for students to be taught the principles of how to devise effective prompts and engage with information more critically given the increasing prevalence of AI in content creation. Critical thinking skills are crucial across all academic and professional careers, so increased focus on these skills in schools would be no bad thing,” said Sophie Parker from Oxford Scholastica Academy.

She explained that the influence of AI on student workflow and creativity is still in its early stages, as evidenced by the recent emergence of models like ChatGPT. Although AI may have seemed distant from the lives of many students before, the widespread adoption of ChatGPT has encouraged them to contemplate more deeply how this technology could affect their learning and prospects, which is a positive development.

Adaptation to a technology this big can not be taken for an easy transition for people in any field. Some experts believe that we are heading at a bullet speed towards the “4th Industrial Revolution”.

The portrayal of artificial intelligence in the media, especially in science fiction movies, has generated apprehension that this technology may eventually render human workers obsolete. As technology has progressed, numerous tasks that were once performed manually have been automated, leading to concerns that the development of intelligent computers could mark the demise of traditional jobs. It's a natural response to the fear that this advancement could bring about significant changes to the nature of work.

Research conducted by McKinsey & Co. back in 2017 estimated that depending on the speed of automation, 0-30 percent of hours worked globally will likely be automated by 2030. Globally, 75 to 375 million people might need to switch their jobs owing to advancements in AI and improved automation capabilities.

Apart from the incorporation of AI in automating mundane tasks, recent advancements in AI have brought about a significant change in the world of arts. AI image generators can now convert written text into unique images, and substantial progress has also been made in AI speech generation. For instance, large language models like GPT-3 have achieved a level of proficiency that persuaded a Google engineer, who was recently fired, of the possibility of machine sentience. Moreover, AI can generate improvised music in a similar style to Bach's compositions, although it is often unfeasible for a human orchestra to perform it.

But these open-source applications are created by extracting photos from the internet, frequently without authorization or appropriate credit to the creators, therefore posing challenging ethical and copyright-related considerations.

This has made some artists distasteful towards the growth of AI in the art domain. These generators can replicate an artist’s painting style and create an original piece altogether.

“It’s been just a month. What about in a year? I probably won’t be able to find my work out there because (the internet) will be flooded with AI art,” the artist Greg Rutkowski said, “That’s concerning.”

While some artists may have reservations about the new AI age we are entering, there are others who embrace the technology. Supporters put forth the view of AI creating new domains of music and arts that haven’t been explored.

“As for the creativity quotient, AI can be seen as both a threat and an opportunity. On one hand, the availability of AI tools and techniques could lead to a homogenization of styles, as AI systems may generate similar works based on existing patterns and trends. On the other hand, AI can also provide new avenues for artistic expression and inspiration, and artists can use AI to challenge traditional notions of creativity and art,” said Lindsey Roussel, founder of Nieux.co.

AI offers potential benefits to the art and music industry, but skeptics are still concerned about the impact the technology will have on the employment landscape. They worry about significant job losses, replacing human workers and making their skills and creativity obsolete.

The concerns are not groundless, but history suggests that advancements in technology have always come up with new job opportunities and the creation of entirely new industries.

“New technologies have spurred the creation of many more jobs than they destroyed, and some of the new jobs are in occupations that cannot be envisioned at the outset. Most jobs created by technology are outside the technology-producing sector itself. We estimate that the introduction of the personal computer, for instance, has enabled the creation of 15.8 million net new jobs in the United States since 1980, even after accounting for jobs displaced.” The McKinsey report noted.

The studies suggest that there will be no dearth of jobs, but a majority of the population is not ready for the shift challenging the concerned institutions and authorities to facilitate the transition.

“The recent fears about AI leading to mass unemployment are unlikely to be realized. Instead, we believe that—like all previous labor-saving technologies—AI will enable new industries to emerge, creating more new jobs than are lost to the technology. But we see a significant need for governments and other parts of society to help smooth this transition, especially for the individuals whose old jobs are disrupted and who cannot easily find new ones,” MIT Work of the Future report said.

The coming age of AI needs people to be trained. Vocational schools and programs are required for those who will be under the direct impact of market disruptions.

The public sector needs to invest actively in reskilling and upskilling. As per the World Economic Forum report 2020, “only 21% of businesses report being able to make use of public funds to support their employees through reskilling and upskilling.”

Amazon, through its Amazon Training Academy(ATA), took a step forward by investing $1.2bn in programs, providing a chance to its 300,000 employees to gain new professional skills by 2025. The company promises better opportunities and significant pay raise to the employees enrolling in these programs.