You Are Wrong – AI Will Take Your Job. Eventually.

I am so annoyed!

Every day you can read a news article or listen to a podcast where some expert tells that their job is not on the line. I was just listening a podcast where an economist was invited to discuss the impacts of AI on the job market. The economist said that according to latest studies, roles such as financial analysts and traders will be replaced by AI in the future – but not economists. “Because economists are so special and have skills no computer can ever have.” Yeah. Right.

Another nonsensical argument against AI is what people seem to be doing by testing out ChatGPT. They give difficult, hard or completely impossible tasks for the AI to work on. Of course it is going to fail. It is a generative model that performs amazingly well on so many things, but it is just a generalist AI. Of course it will not match your current specialist knowledge. Yet. But by testing it out and making ChatGPT to fail, you have given the developers at OpenAI valuable examples that need to be fixed. And, believe me, the engineers will eventually fix these shortcomings. Thanks for the examples

AI is Evolving Fast

We can easily debate and say that the AI made mistake in this or that. Sure, quite likely it did. But it is doing these mistakes less and less every day. In January 2023 we had GPT-3 that was creating up facts and made up citations in texts. A couple of months later GPT-4 is writing very coherent text, causing teachers all around the globe to be worried about the future of education and how to prevent students from cheating. And all of this just in a matter of months. Months!

The current state of the art in AI is truly awesome. I was sure that an AI like ChatGPT would not be possible this decade. And I was so wrong. After ChatGPT gained massive interest in the start of the year, we have seen a massive appearance of other large language models (LLMs). Google has their own, the Arab Emirates have their own, The Chinese have their own, even Finland has their own large language model! On top of this, we are seeing generation of realistic voice by AI. For instance, this text was read aloud by the author’s voice, which was cloned by AI. Additionally, image and video generation by AI have also become possible. All of this in roughly one year.

The Future of Work with AI

I understand that the current circus around Artificial Intelligence is scary and annoys many professionals. The hype can get out of hands and by reading Twitter discussions, it seems that Terminator is waiting us just around the corner. But there is a lot of truth buried in all of this. The AI is good. And we will loose our jobs. It is just a question of when, not if.

But we are not losing our jobs really. We are just losing the current kind of jobs, not the actual work (at least yet :-P). Our worklife is changing to something different. And that is a good thing.

A doctor does not want to spend their days reading and writing patient records like a secretary. A university professor does not want to fill Excel-sheets and write project reports like a manager. An electrician does not want to read tedious manuals to understand where a wire has to be plugged in. Heck, even as a programmer, I do not want to write code for the same boring login screen and set up a new web server for the 100th time. Because all this work is so repetitive, it rarely brings us new insights or even challenges us – at least in the way we wanted to challenge us professionally, not by trying to learn Excel-macros.

Instead, our work life will be supported by different AI tools. Some of them help to write our reports, some to search for important information we need to do our actual job. Perhaps other AIs proof-read our texts or handle more mundane tasks such as appointment calendaring with multiple collegues. Some of them make graphics, create endless personalized concentration music for your workday or even call a customer service on your behalf and negotiate on an insurance claim. Who knows? Quite likely all of these and even more.

So, the next time someone comes to you and says: “AI will not take my job” or “AI does not affect me“, take it with a hint of salt. AI will not take the job today, but it is evolving. Who knows what happens in the next five years? I quite frankly think that AI will take my job as a programmer. And I honestly hope so. I can then concentrate on other interesting things. Like writing blogs, teaching or doing research.

…oh wait. AI does that too already?