How will AI Change Jobs and Society? (Roundtable Interview)
AI is poised to significantly impact jobs and society in the coming years. Here are some key ways AI is likely to drive changes:
Job Automation: Many jobs involving routine, repetitive tasks are at high risk of being automated by AI and robotics. This includes jobs in manufacturing, data entry, customer service, transportation, and more. Millions of jobs could be displaced.
Job Transformation: AI will also augment and transform many jobs, changing the nature of work. Professionals like doctors, lawyers, designers, and financial analysts will increasingly use AI tools to enhance their work. This will put a premium on skills like judgment, creativity, and emotional intelligence.
New Jobs: The AI revolution will also create entirely new categories of jobs, many which are hard to imagine today. Just as the Internet spawned new jobs like social media manager and cloud computing specialist, the AI era will give rise to roles like AI ethicist, AI supervisor, and human-machine teaming manager.
Economic Disruption: The rapid pace of AI-driven job transformation could lead to significant economic disruption and inequality, as some workers are displaced while others thrive in the new economy. Policies like universal basic income, job retraining, and worker protections may be needed to smooth the transition.
Decision-Making: As AI is used to make higher-stakes decisions in areas like hiring, lending, healthcare, and criminal justice, ensuring these systems are fair, unbiased and transparent will be critical. AI will force society to grapple with complex issues around algorithmic accountability.
Human-Machine Interaction: As AI becomes more sophisticated, questions will arise around the nature of intelligence and the proper relationship between humans and machines. Should AIs be treated as tools, partners, or even as entities deserving of certain rights? Answering these questions will have profound societal implications.
Overall, AI has immense potential to boost productivity and improve human lives, but also brings significant risks around job losses, inequality, bias, privacy, and more. Proactively addressing these challenges will be one of the great social questions of the coming decades. Both technological solutions and policy innovations will likely be required. If we can get it right, the age of AI could usher in unprecedented prosperity and progress for humanity.
We had a powwow with a few experts on the issue. Here is what they had to say.
Puneet Gogia, Data, AI & Excel Expert, at Excel Champs
“1. Job Transformation and Creation
Automation: Many jobs will be automated by AI because AI is particularly good at performing simple, repetitive tasks. Fewer jobs will remain in sectors where AI is more disruptive. These sectors are operations-heavy and tied to laborious data transmission processes, including routine back-end functions for large corporations. There will also be more automation of conquered or routine areas of decision-making, including many jobs that involve data entry, simple customer service tasks, or basic decision-making.
New jobs will be created: for instance, while AI will replace some jobs, it also creates new job and career opportunities – for example, in AI development, data analysis, cybersecurity and AI ethics. The need for staff specialising in AI, in machine learning engineers and data scientists is sharply increasing.
Required skills match: The skills required for jobs will shift, with more value attached to technologies, programming, problem-solving, creativity and interpersonal communication. Ongoing learning and skills flexibility will be essential for workers to be relevant in the AI-driven economy.
2. Societal Impacts
Health: Here, AI could enhance diagnostic precision and tailor treatment strategies to patients’ needs, improving efficiency and outcomes. It might also enable more widespread access and coverage to healthcare services.
Education: Personalised education can be provided to every child, via AI, which can also detect (and even predict) student needs, automate some processes and make the system more inclusive and effective.
Privacy and ethics: there are certain growing concerns about the implications of AI on our privacy and ethical norms, mainly due to the nature of surveillance and data collection, and ultimately decision-making by AI that discriminate classes of people. An adequate set of ethical norms and standards would be essential for overcoming these concerns.
Economic inequality: AI’s benefits might favour those with the highest levels of skills, widening economic inequality. Those harmed might be relatively less well-skilled workers. Policies to equalise wealth distribution – for instance taxing AI profits above some level or providing all citizens with a sufficient basic income – might be beneficial.
3. Long-Term Outlook
Collaborative Human-AI Interaction: Longer-term, interest might be in how to engage humans and AI in fitting collaborations between analysis and the creativity and empathy of skilled humans.
Governance and Regulation: Governments and other international bodies must come up with robust frameworks to regulate AI development and deployment in a manner that maximises the benefits and minimises the harms.”
Vaclav Vincalek, Founder at 555vCTO
“Technology has always changed how society approaches work, and AI is no different. Job losses, but also job creation. The demand for data and language scientists are through the roof. And AI is spurring the rapid growth of tech startups that are using advanced technology to come up with new ways of doing old work. I myself have used it that way, incorporating AI into a platform called Hiswai as a way to enhance online searching.
So how else will AI change jobs and our society? Repetitive work that requires data entry, administrative tasks like scheduling, and related jobs would be most vulnerable and likely replaced by AI.
Also, most jobs where AI algorithms can perform functions or analyses far faster and more accurately than a human are at risk as well. For example, wealth advising could be done by improved robo advisors. AI can sift through large amounts of data (numbers, text, audio, video) and can spot anomalies much faster than any human can.
But just like in the past, the emergence of AI will lead to new job creation. When machines took over farm labor, there was an increased need for manufacturing workers. When assembly lines reduced automobile labor, the industry suddenly needed people in sales and repair.
As AI advances, society will adapt. We’ll see a boon in ‘upskilling’, roles related to AI training. Not to mention, everyday workers whose jobs are augmented by AI can increase their productivity. And increased productivity can lead to company growth, which in turn leads to more hiring.
As a tech advisor, it’s my job to stay on top of the most relevant technology available to clients, and help them decipher the most suitable tech to incorporate into their business strategy. These days, AI is always top of mind.”
Scott Lieberman, Owner of Touchdown Money
“Huge shifts in jobs are already being seen with the removal of some jobs and opening of others for humans to oversee their AI counterparts in roles such as developing, maintaining and managing these AI systems. These new jobs will require learning new skills understanding AI, software, and technology with ongoing training.
We don’t know the exact impact it will have on society, but we will likely face an income and inequality issue as most of the workers AI will replace may find it difficult to transfer their job skills without furthering their education. This will certainly impact those currently living on low wages.
Although the implementation of AI will boost productivity and efficiency for companies and create more revenue, it also poses a challenge to society. Those displaced will need to find employment with similar wages and benefits. If thousands of people relinquish their jobs to AI, all will be competing for a small pool of jobs remaining.”
“AI will change jobs and society, and we can already see some of the places where it will have the most impact. While ChatGPT has been incredibly hot for the last few years, AI and automation have been making their way into different parts of the economy for more than a decade.
For example, call centers already use many different types of automation and AI technologies to route calls to the right places, help agents answer questions, and direct some callers to 100% automated solutions. Now, with the quality improvements from next-generation AI tools powered by large language models (LLMs), this trend will continue and likely accelerate.
Marketers and consumer product companies have also been using AI and automation to create better marketing copy, better marketing assets, and better ad campaigns for years. Now, with LLMs and tools like ChatGPT, it is easier than ever to spin up 100 variants of an ad campaign and pick the best ones.
As different industries are affected by AI differently, it will be important to understand if certain types of jobs are going away completely or if they will be augmented by AI. Many jobs will be augmented by AI, and one person will be expected to do the work of 10 people in a pre-AI world.
In the long run, this should be good for the economy because more businesses will be able to generate more revenue, but in the short term, there will be a lot of job displacement, and the government and educational system need to find ways to retrain existing workers and prepare the next generation for a world of jobs that is augmented by AI.”
Prof. Thierry Rayna, Researcher at CNRS i³-CRG laboratory & Prof. at École Polytechnique (IP Paris)
“AI replacing a lawyer, students using AI to generate essays or exam answers so good they fool their teachers, artists out of work because anyone can use an AI algorithm to generate the front page of a world-known magazine, or compose the music of a movie or an ad… Such examples have certainly caught the attention of everyone in the past couple of months. In particular, the impending Armageddon of white-collar jobs and other ‘intellectual’ professions has been making the front cover of pretty much every single news outlet.
Generative AI suffers the same limitations as discriminative AI. As good as it looks, it replaces in fact a good intern or trainee (but typically one that does not learn), not the expert or master. GenAI or DALL-E may produce very good initial results, but those always have to be verified, curated and fine-tuned by expert humans.
What is impressive with GenAI is not the intrinsic quality of the results, but the self-assurance and aplomb it displays in communicating the results, even when those are complete fabrication – GenAI is effectively a potential fake news algorithm. As usual, what AI takes away is the repetitive part of our jobs – but who, among ‘intellectual’ professions, still carries mainly repetitive task nowadays?
The consequence of open AI may be to take some of the livelihood of some professions, but more likely, this AI will make it so much easier to create information, content, services and products, that we will need even more people to assess, sort and curate the resulting production – just like Web 2.0 (the web technology underpinning social media) in its time led to an explosion of the production of content which made human input more and not less needed (you have your facts, I have my alterative facts).
This increased work, however, does not mean that there will be more employment. Just as has happened in previous waves of digitisations, employments may well be destroyed (like has been the case in the news and media, music, service, etc. industries), the extra work being carried out by independent workers, who, relying on platforms, are now able to deliver on their own activities that had been traditionally done by companies.
This is probably one of the most important points. Unlike what we hear, the issue is not so much about people losing their jobs, but about companies losing their jobs.
This, again, has occurred with each previous single stage of digitisation: step 1, companies adopt digital technologies (digital music, web, service platforms) to incrementally improve their offers (doing pretty much the same, but with the technology) and people lose their job; step 2, said technologies become widely adopted by a general public and this open use leads to the discovery of truly radical use of the technology (social media, collective, sharing economy…), leading to disruptions that leave many companies out of business (ironically, the workers that were laid off in stage 1 are often among those who lead the revolution in step 2).”
