There is an innate fear amongst employees with regards to jobs being at risks with the invention of AI’s like ChatGPT. One study found that over the next two decades 47% of US jobs could be wiped out by AI. Though AI is just few months old it is already causing waves in the business world affecting the future of labor.
Robot and human working together in office. Impact of artificial intelligence on labor market in future. Created with Generative AI
Concerns about AI taking jobs
Experts say ChatGPT and related AI could threaten some jobs, particularly white collar ones. Since its release in November of last year, the impressive AI chatbot has been used to write cover letters, create a children’s book, and even help students cheat on their essays. Though it’s not perfect. “AI will never be as good as the best experts in a field,” one Wharton business school professor said. Despite few imperfections, the rise of ChatGPT has inevitably sparked debates over whether it will replace jobs.
AI technologies like ChatGPT could infringe on people’s jobs especially white collar ones is becoming an even more tangible reality, Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute who has researched AI’s impact on the American workforce, told Insider. “It has really captured people’s imaginations and made tangible how this could play out,” Muro said. Muro expects that AI will only get cheaper and become more advanced in the future, which could potentially disrupt white collar work as we know it.
Anu Madgavkar, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute, an economic research hub, agrees. Human judgement still needs to be applied to these technologies to avoid error and bias, she told Insider.
Jobs affected by AI
Coders, software developers, and data analysts
Coders, software developers, and data analysts could be displaced by AI, an expert says. Tech jobs such as software developers, web developers, computer programmers, coders, and data scientists are “pretty amenable” to AI technologies “displacing more of their work,” Madgavkar said.
Tech companies like OpenAI are already considering replacing software engineers with AI decreasing the job prospects for humans.
Still, Oded Netzer, a Columbia Business School professor, thinks that AI will help coders rather than replace them.
Media jobs
Experts say AI like ChatGPT is good at producing written content and can do so “more efficiently than humans. Media jobs across the board, likes of advertising, technical writing, journalism, may be affected by ChatGPT and similar forms of AI due to its ability to read, write, and understand text based data well. Though experts say there are lot of human judgement that goes into these and everything cannot be automated.
Legal industry jobs
AI can replicate some of the work that paralegals and legal assistants do, though they aren’t entirely replaceable. Language oriented roles like these are susceptible to automation. But again, AI won’t fully be able to automate these jobs since it requires a degree of human judgement to understand what a client or employer wants.
Market research analysts
As AI is good at analyzing data and predicting outcomes market research analysts jobs could be affected. They are responsible for collecting data, identifying trends within that data, and using what they found to design an effective marketing campaign or decide where to place advertising. “Those are things that we’re now seeing that AI could handle,” Muro said.
Finance jobs
Workers in the finance industry could be at risk for AI replacement, expert says, finance jobs that require manipulating significant amounts of numerical data can be affected by AI. “AI can identify trends in the market, highlight what investments in a portfolio are doing better and worse, communicate all that, and then use various other forms of data by, say, a financial company to forecast a better investment mix,” Muro said.
Few more
Other than the above few other sectors that could get affected are:
- Graphic designers
- Accountants
- Customer service agents
- Traders
- Teachers
In short
We all know that AI definitely cannot replace human capabilities completely, though to neglect the fact that computers replaced a lot of jobs in the early years and created a lot of opportunities is like not accepting the stark reality. AI might do the same in the future.