As many voices echo a chorus of fear about artificial intelligence (A.I.), I am more inclined to look at some of the many possibilities that AI can make our workforce more efficient—in ways that will be better for humanity itself and progress.
A recent study by researchers at Oslo University Hospital in Norway determined that “having a routine job with little mental stimulation during your 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s was linked to a 66 percent higher risk of mild cognitive impairment and a 37 percent greater risk of dementia after the age of 70,” when compared with having a job with high cognitive and interpersonal demands.
When we examine the first wave of jobs that A.I. seems to be targeting, the positions tend to be in that segment of those routine tasks, including:
- Data entry
- Administrative tasks
- Manufacturing
- Assembly line jobs
- Retail checkouts (much as many of us may hate dealing with self-checkout)
Is artificial intelligence helping humanity by inhabiting jobs that are not healthy for us? The late economist Robert Solow posited that we did not have to worry about a future with no jobs for us humans. He wrote in “Problems that Don’t Worry Me,” that automation had offered productivity growth of 3 percent a year. But, he posited, “certain specific kinds of labor … may become obsolete and command a suddenly lower price in the market … and the human cost can be very great.”
Goldman Sachs calculated that roughly two-thirds of US jobs are “exposed to some degree of automation by AI.”
But don’t panic yet.
According to Robert Schumpeter, all the way back in the 1940s, changes wrought by modernization offer an opportunity for “creative destruction” powered by innovation. In other words, as old jobs and ways of doing things are made obsolete, the opportunities for innovation and creation are there.
According to the World Economic Forum, jobs of the future that work in conjunction with artificial intelligence will include “trainers, explainers, and sustainers.” As I have been saying for some time now, we will need people to work with AI—the trainers. The World Economic Forum also notes that engineers will be necessary because of the microchips specially designed for AI.
The “explainers” will be those people figuring out how humans can best interface with AI. Artificial intelligence (think of something like ChatGPT) works with Large Language Models (LLMs)—and people able to make the user experience seamless will be in demand.
Finally, the sustainers. According to the World Economic they will be the content creators, data curators, and ethics and governance specialists.
Artificial intelligence and Large Language Models are already transforming our world. They are changing the ways we do business—and the nature of work itself. Because I work in the world of electronics, I know that artificial intelligence is and will displace some jobs—those jobs that are repetitive and can be performed by a machine. As the Oslo study makes clear, these are not the jobs we should be trying to train for humans. But the World Economic Forum’s report concludes, “It will be incumbent upon business and government to take proactive steps in preparing the workforce for the extensive transition to come, to ensure that all members of society benefit from the potential of generative AI.”
- https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/17/health/brain-job-dementia-wellness/index.html.
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2024/06/17/what-jobs-will-ai-replace-first/.
- https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/27/1087041/technological-unemployment-elon-musk-jobs-ai/.
- Ibid
- https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/09/jobs-ai-will-create/.
- Ibid
- Ibid
- Ibid