AI Promise and Pain
What will we do when 80% of our jobs are automated or replaced by AI tools?
Who will keep the economy going by buying consumer goods and services if our salaries are vastly reduced or eliminated?
Where will food banks get groceries from when more people need them than donate to them?
Think I am doom-mongering?
The Receipts
Over 30% of jobs involve driving. Already the need to drive has dropped dramatically, but now tens of thousands of jobs where driving is the job, three percent of the active working population, are being replaced by automated vehicles, first in industries such as farming, railways/trams, and mining, but increasingly regular transport and shipping.
Automated tools are taking over even in the legal profession, can take on more caseload and often do a better job. Heck there is a bot that can contest your driving tickets for you.
In the last few months, we have seen a viral explosion of "AI art", from paintings and design through to story creation and music. Copywriting tools are exploding that claim to be able to out-write professional copywriters, not just assist them.
My CMO posted a list of tools to the company slack, and quite a few of my colleagues wonder who will lose out to a SaaS first.
Even video editing is getting eroded by AI tools, I myself use a tool that edits out the pauses and filler words, but there are tools in development that will take a lot of extra work from editors, even with the potential to multi-camera produce in almost real-time for live streams.
A common troll trope is for people to learn to code. Hate to say it but there is a lot of code now being produced without much human intervention.
Fortunately, right now it introduces errors that are difficult to spot unless you are knowledgeable in the topic. See if you can spot the error in the Commodore BASIC code above?
It used to be "skilled/knowledge work" was the route to the middle class. When knowledge is on tap 24/7, and even creative pursuits just require a tweet-length prompt, where does that leave the tax base and the humans who pay those taxes?
Hard to pay the landlord with AI prompts if all your neighbors who were replaced by robots are trying to do the same thing.
The Promise of AI
While it would be unwise to absolutely trust the AI tools one hundred percent, they are still very handy even now, and will only get better as more bugs and use-cases are discovered.
Take the coding example, here is some code I asked ChatGPT to provide.
Nothing that can't be done with Google? Well, the difference is, with ChatGPT you can ask for clarifications, corrections, and tweaks.
Given the correction it can make changes to the code it generates intelligently.
Now imagine instead of me correcting the AI it was interactively building new code and correctly. Rather than "ask and retrieve" it is much more interactive, almost like you have an assistant combined with a tutor.
As someone who loves to draw, I will continue to sketch and create art, but fortunately I do not rely on it for income so I can play with the tools for inspiration or filters, free of worry. What I will not do, however, is trust the tool to protect me from IP infringement and I will not provide my likeness.
Any ladies reading this, be even more careful because already image generation has been used to generate pr0n imagery with unwitting victims likenesses.
Concluding Thought
How many jobs will be lost in the USA to ai and automation over the next decade?
It is difficult to accurately predict the exact number of jobs that will be lost to AI and automation in the US over the next decade. Some experts believe that AI and automation could potentially displace a significant number of jobs, while others believe that these technologies will create new job opportunities that offset any job losses.
There is no doubt that AI and automation will have a major impact on the job market in the coming years. Some jobs that are repetitive or routine in nature may be particularly vulnerable to automation, while other jobs that require human judgment and decision-making may be less vulnerable.
It is important for workers to be proactive in developing new skills and staying up-to-date with the latest technologies in order to remain competitive in the job market. Employers also have a role to play in helping their workers to adapt to the changing job market by providing training and support for career development.