In recent years, artificial intelligence has grown at an unprecedented rate and has been integrated into a variety of businesses. However, its rapid expansion has raised concerns about job losses, as AI may eventually automate many functions previously performed by humans.
For example, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told Bloomberg on May 1 that AI and automation may replace 7,800 positions at the company over the next five years, accounting for around 30% of its staff.
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While AI has the potential to improve efficiency, productivity, and cost-cutting, the rapid advancements seen in tools such as ChatGPT-4 — which represents a significant improvement over its predecessor, ChatGPT-3.5 — have many people concerned that their industry will be among the hardest hit by related job losses.
ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) may already be used to execute a number of activities, including smart contract code generation, community administration, market analysis, and more.
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According to a March study report from professional services firm Accenture, the growing popularity of ChatGPT is “AI’s first true inflection point in public adoption,” adding:
“Nearly every job will be impacted — some will be eliminated, most will be transformed, and many new jobs will be created.”
According to Accenture’s research, LLMs might effect 40% of working hours across multiple industries, with banking being the most likely to be affected, with 54% of jobs having a high potential for automation, closely followed by insurance at 48%.
Replacement and synthesis
Gary Marcus, an AI entrepreneur and co-author of the book Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust, was asked by Cointelegraph what he thought about AI’s impact on various industries.
Marcus speculated that commercial artists might be the most vulnerable. “Commercial art” relates to branding, logos, advertising, and graphic design – in general, commercial art.
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Commercial art differs from fine art, which includes paintings, sculpture, and photography and is more likely to be presented at art museums such as the Louvre and is considerably more difficult for AI to make.
Marcus, on the other hand, downplayed the risk of job losses in the medium term, stating that “in many cases, people will work together with machines, at least for the next several years.”
Marcus responded, “It’s hard to know for sure, but I think that creative problem-solving skills and good critical thinking will remain valuable for a long time.”
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The World Economic Forum has also been keeping a close eye on the possibility of employment losses due to AI. It released its “Future of Jobs Report 2023” on April 30, predicting that clerical or secretarial jobs, such as bank tellers and data entry clerks, would be hurt the hardest.
AI-powered job creation
While the WEF report emphasizes that AI will most likely replace many occupations, it also acknowledges that it will create jobs and is simply contributing to an overall trend toward automation.
In its research, Accenture makes similar arguments, stating that many of the “language tasks” that LLMs could automate could be “transformed into more productive activity through augmentation and automation.”
A working paper published on March 27 by ChatGPT maker OpenAI and University of Pennsylvania academics argues that more hands-on occupations such as cooks, mechanics, and stonemasons are unlikely to be supplanted by AI technologies in the near future.
The report also anticipates that positions involving data or information processing, as well as those in the healthcare industry, will be far more vulnerable to automation because programming and writing skills are more in line with the capabilities of LLMs such as ChatGPT.
While the healthcare business will continue to require a large number of people for more hands-on activities such as nurses and surgeons, providers are increasingly adopting AI to analyze patient data, thus many healthcare personnel involved in data analysis may have their jobs automated.
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Overall, it appears that clerical and other administrative roles will be the most heavily impacted jobs in the coming years, and workers who can hone their creative/analytical thinking skills and become adept at using AI tools to boost their productivity will have the best chance of not being replaced.
