In today’s Artificial Intelligence Rumor Control: Will everyone lose their jobs?
This is one of the Top 5 Questions we get asked each week.
The short answer, or TL;DR:
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- Not everyone.
- However, many people will no longer work in their niche or profession during the next ten years.
Artificial Intelligence Rumor Control: Up to the Minute Clarity about AI
There are understandable concerns when any new technology comes along. As with anything tech, especially rapidly improving tech, we established our Artificial Intelligence (AI) Rumor Control to clear the air of misinformation by being the clearing house of up-to-date, accurate information.
Since we work with AI daily, we appreciate that the amount of change feels like drinking water from a firehose.
We engage with your questions and concerns in these articles and in forums on LinkedIn, YouTube, and X (Twitter).
You’re invited to Contact Us for up-to-date details about how AI can help you and your business.
A Brief Tech History
Back in 1877, when Alexander Graham Bell founded the American Bell Telephone Company, who would have believed that manual telephone exchanges (switchboards) would employ tens of thousands? It got to the point that Bell employees would recruit women during their last high school years to expand at the rate of growth the company was experiencing. That’s one of the benefits of having a vertically integrated monopoly (Bell also owned the phone equipment in everyone’s home).
Then, the integrated circuit was invented, and all of these jobs disappeared in short order.
Jobs Will Change
In general, any job with a repetitive and office-based task will change first.
Here are a few professions to consider:
Accountants
The accounting profession that specializes in tax preparation has already experienced this process once, with the advent of companies like Intuit’s TurboTax.
However, AI will take over most of the accounting profession because the complexities of accounting are simple for AI.
Yes, there will always be a need for the personal touch and for niche specialists. This is true for many professions.
Artists
There’s enormous pushback from people in most artistic industries: “Only humans can make art.”
While we can debate that philosophy forever, the bottom line is that the need for artists in professions such as music, voiceover, photography, and painting has already substantially declined.
Any musician will tell you that when MP3.com became a thing, the world learned that people would choose convenience over anything else.
In 2022, human voiceovers were a big business for a company we owned. In 2023, that business transferred to people who could run AI-generated voiceovers and correct the mistakes that the AI made. In 2024, anyone can make perfect AI-generated voiceovers through companies like Elevenlabs.
The same is valid for music (Example: SoundRaw).
Images (photography and paintings) are now generated with near perfection through AI, including Midjourney.
Next will be creating movies. This is already available with Chat GPT (concept and script writing) and the soon-to-be-released Sora (coming in 2024).
Attorneys
Any attorney working primarily outside a courtroom or not involved in person-to-person negotiations (example: Divorce settlements) will likely see their jobs disappear. The caveat for attorneys, as well as other professions, is if they build into the legal code a requirement that only a human attorney can do a particular job.
The catch to this scenario is that other countries won’t have this legal protection, so regulatory relief will likely lead to an enlargement of attorney offshoring which will result in even more job losses.
Computer Coders
It’s not shocking that AI can already code better than most people. All you need is ChatGPT and knowledge of how to ask it questions. Soon, most programs will be coded by AI.
This scenario makes people nervous because they won’t understand how the programs operate. But that ship actually sailed in the 1990s. Computer programs became so complex that large programs were broken up into small pieces, and eventually, only a few people understood how an entire program functioned. In this sense, AI is a somewhat unpredicted but logical continuation of this trend.
Marketing and Advertising
Everything that affects artists applies to marketing. The difference is that it’s happening much more quickly. In 2024, AI can make every part of a video advertisement for a cost savings of between 50% and 90%.
Medical Doctors
Are you wondering what ails you? We’ve had WebMD for years, so the logical next step is an interactive AI doctor that has access to much more data than any human could access or understand.
Scientists
The last breakthroughs in physics were in the early 1900s. Since then, physicists have been crunching numbers and commissioning the building of ever more extensive test apparatus to determine the nature of everything.
One hundred years later:
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- We still need to find out what constitutes 85% to 95% of the material that makes up the universe (currently called dark energy and dark matter).
- The “theory of everything” doesn’t exist; it’s a theory that includes gravity and relativity.
- We don’t have a working fusion energy system that produces more energy than it consumes.
AI has the potential to make leaps in logic that would either take human scientists a long time or are simply beyond our understanding.
Artificial Intelligence: The Bright Side
Humanity has experienced tech revolutions many times, and we’re resilient. Yes, it has been ugly during a major transition, and it could be ugly again during the AI transition, which will involve major changes to what “work” actually means and how we’re compensated for it.
But humans have options:
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- There will always be a place for specialists in any field.
- The do-it-yourself (DIY) movement continues to grow stronger.
- We’re very good at building new businesses based on new ideas.
The critical thing is to start preparing now.
For more information about how our work in Applied Artificial Intelligence can help you, please get in touch with us HERE.
Here’s a scientist’s perspective on AI from February 2024.