AI: Automating your job, or just the boring parts?
A new plan from IBM is the surest sign AI is coming for millions of jobs, said Hasan Chowdhury in Business Insider. A pause on hiring announced last week for roles that IBM believes could be “better performed by artificial intelligence” is the “starkest and most direct” indication from a tech company of where the work world is headed. “Earnings calls from tech firms such as Meta, Alphabet, and Microsoft have been littered with references to AI,” at the same time that tough economic conditions have forced them to get efficient. Automation doesn’t necessarily mean AI will snatch everyone’s existing jobs overnight, but it can “slow future growth in head count while enhancing the productivity of a shrinking workforce.” And many of the tech jobs lost in the past two years may never return.
About 20 percent of U.S. workers are currently in occupations vulnerable to this technology, which can complete half their tasks more quickly, said Lauren Weber and Lindsay Ellis in The Wall Street Journal. They include accountants, writers, interpreters, even mathematicians, according to a recent study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT. As many as 80 percent of U.S. workers are in “occupations where at least one job task” could be better accomplished by AI. Shares of Chegg, a company that produces online study guides, plummeted 50 percent last week after Chegg admitted losing business to smart chatbots, said Richard Waters in the Financial Times. Wall Street has deemed its value to be just a third of what it was when ChatGPT launched last year. “The online education market looks like the first to be disrupted by generative AI. It certainly won’t be the last.”
The panic is overblown, said Hiawatha Bray in The Boston Globe. There are plenty of examples of other “technical innovations that were expected to result in massive job losses, but didn’t.” ATMs were supposed to wipe out bank tellers—until customers demanded better service. AI has been capable of scanning X-rays for years, yet about a third of radiologists use this supposedly threatening technology in their work today. Workers might embrace AI if they let it automate all the boring and repetitive tasks, said Louis Hyman in The New York Times. That will “free us up to be more stimulated, more creative, and more human in our work.” As a historian, “I was quick to sneer at the idea that ChatGPT could ever do part of my job.” However, when I asked it to write computer code to analyze data sets, that boring, repetitive task became as easy as typing in the request. “If a historian can do it, anybody can.”