AI and the Future of Work
AI will affect essentially all fields of work, in various ways. It poses a particularly acute risk to entry level work, meaning early career jobs for those just coming out of college, university, or technical school.
This is because entry level jobs typically consist of mundane and repetitive tasks which do not involve high level decision making. This is precisely what AI is most capable of doing, and both more cheaply and more rapidly than an intern.
This is problematic as entry level jobs are essential for young people to enter the workforce, and to begin building up the experience necessary to steadily take on more responsibility and more complex tasks.
Employers will need to be incentivized to maintain entry level positions rather than offloading these workloads to AI to ensure that young adults are able to enter the workforce.
‘Natural Language’ tasks, which are those mundane tasks usually given to entry level employees usually make up about 25% of workplace tasks, and these could be delegated to AI at low cost.
Fewer entry level positions, will mean fewer employees building skills from the bottom up, which means higher level positions will go to those who are already or currently in advanced positions with valuable skill sets, which will mean less diversity in leadership positions due to how difficult it is to enter the workforce at all.
Jobs most likely to be impacted: customer service, marketing and sales, software engineering, research, and development.
AI and Knowledge Work:
Knowledge work is that work which depends on expertise and advanced skills in certain subject matter, such as psychology, literature, chemical engineering and much more. Knowledge workers spend around 20% of their work time searching for information, and this will be minimized with the use of AI.
Virtual Experts: Knowledge workers will be assisted by AI systems specifically trained in a certain subject matter which will serve as an on-hand information assistant which will be available to provide information rapidly, cheaply, and on-demand.
◇ AI is capable of synthesizing large amounts of unstructured information, which is a slow and laborious task for human beings.
◇ Chat GPT will severely impact those jobs which involve creating lengthy written documents and contracts such as research, development, and legal work.
Coding: ChaptGPT can create code for software and applications and will eventually replace most programming jobs with the caveat that it can only work from existing code so there are limitations in that it cannot invent new code.
◇ However chaptGPT cannot innovate or find new solutions to problems, because it only produces new syntheses of existing information and knowledge.
Virtual Workplace Assistants: These AI systems will perform mundane tasks such as scheduling, inbox management and prioritizing tasks, and will also usurp entry level positions.
Co-bots: collaborative AI bots which will automate physical dangerous or demanding tasks for humans
AI and Job Skills:
The rapidly evolving and adaptive nature of AI technology also means that professional skills developed during workers careers or education will quickly become obsolete and irrelevant.
◇ One way to manage this is to maintain an expectation and strategy of continuously acquiring new skills during your career, taking advantage of workplace training opportunities, continuing education opportunities, and pursuing independent learning.
◇ It will also be necessary to learn to work with the new AI technology to ensure that you can use it as a tool rather than being supplanted by it.
◇ It will be critical to develop and demonstrate advanced social, emotional and critical thinking skills in order to be an asset in the workplace in ways which AI cannot reach.
◇ Skill Sets involving data science and AI programming will thrive.
◇ Those who cannot develop new skills and learn to work with AI will face limited job prospects and stagnant incomes.
Essential workplace skills: analytical judgment, flexibility, emotional intelligence, intellectual curiosity, bias detection and handling, AI delegation/prompting
Chief AI officer: Future workplaces will have a chief AI officer as a commonplace executive and department, responsible for overseeing the operation and security of AI systems in the workplace. This new role would be similar to the introduction of the chief privacy officer position which has become commonplace in tech companies in the past ten years.
According to a recent McKinsey report, 60-70% of workplace tasks will be automated within the next 10 years. It is estimated that 25% of all work will be replaced by generative AI in the near future, leaving millions struggling to find viable employment and quality of life.
Middle management, project management, and human resources positions will largely be usurped by AI as these roles consist primarily of mundane tasks and involve minimal human creative and high level decision making.
Low and middle skill workers will be most exposed to the intrusion of automation while high skilled workers will be slightly less exposed. Automation will likely result in new and more high skilled jobs but fewer low and middle skill ones.
Jobs likely to be lost to AI: programming, finance, accounting, engineering, art, piloting.
◇ While these jobs will not be entirely lost the labor involved will be less valuable and the remaining jobs will be for the highly skilled doing creative decision making and problem solving, responsible for the innovation aspects of these roles.
Jobs with the least vulnerability to automation:
teaching, management, chief executives, senior officials, legislators, hospitality, retail, and service managers.
Jobs which cannot be replaced by AI:
Surgeons, nurses, teachers, therapists, social workers, research scientists, chefs, emergency responders, architects, physical labor.
This kind of work will be less affected, these jobs are held by a larger percentage of women than men and include such roles as nursing, teaching, social work, health care support, and so on.
Book and Text Translation: This industry is one example of the effects of technology. As language technology has developed over the past thirty years, the role of translators has progressively been reduced to that of low-wage project managers overseeing the technology engaged in the actual translation. The role of actual translators is now to simply refine the translation done by AI tools.
These changes have eroded the profitability of the translation industry and virtually obliterated the role of translator. One way this could have been moderated would be through unionization, which did not happen.
AI and Hiring:
Predictive analytics is a form of AI which is and will continue to be used to process job applications, meaning that the technology will be used to scans applications for keywords, credentials and skills, will quantify the score of each application and will discard those below a certain score, meaning that only a select few that were able to pass the sensors will actual be evaluated by humans.
◇ This will make the hiring process even more mechanistic and brutal, as writing applications and securing positions will be a matter of most effectively meeting the metrics by parroting expected and desired information.
Lexion: this is an AI company specifically designed to assist with the hiring process.
AI will be integrated into the workplace in many different ways and speeds. One example of the is UPS, which has integrated AI systems to analyze, predict and strategize driver routes based on traffic, weather and package volume to determine the most efficient routes and schedules which has saved the company money and reduced their carbon footprint.
Automation and Quality of Work:
“The highly skilled technical jobs are in demand and highly paid, the low skilled service jobs are in demand and badly paid, but the mid-qualification jobs in factories and offices, i.eThe majority of jobs are under pressure and reduced because they are relatively predictable, and most likely to be automated.” (Baldwin 2019).
One of the many concerns and considerations with regard to the integration of AI into the workplace is the quality of jobs available to employees.
◇ AI as Surveillance: At the moment employers have been using AI to monitor and track worker efficiency and productivity, which actually results in decreased efficiency, productivity, job satisfaction, and mental health.
A labor study in Germany reports that engineers at a firm in Germany are actually more productive when they do not have to log into and out of the companies monitoring system, and when they are not being monitored by an invasive AI system.
◇ AI is also being used to cut jobs by maximizing the efficiency of existing ones, and to maximize the efficiency of worker schedules, particularly in service and shift work, which results in ideal schedules for employers and unstable schedules for shift workers.
If and when AI is integrated into the workplace then it must be introduced in such a way to maintain and create high quality jobs, meaning those which prioritize worker health and well-being.
* One way to respond to AI making work more efficient is to reduce the amount of time workers spend working, making the work week three or four days rather than five. This would be a way to mitigate worker displacement by moderating the pace of work with a shorter work week.
A key tool for moderating the use and introduction of AI into the workplace and ensuring quality of work and life for employees is through labor unions, which are currently on the rise.
Labor Unions and the Ground Floor: Labor unions are also strategically involving themselves in the ground floor design phase of AI development, in order to ensure that human rights and quality of life are a consideration from the inception of the AI system.
Labor Unions and Ethics: Labor Unions consolidate employee power and are a primary source of political and economic pressure to impose ethical standards on the use and development of AI.
The 2023 writer’s strike in Hollywood against the immoderate use of AI in project writing and development is one instance of this, another is the recent consolidation and strike of amazon warehouse workers.
Advanced Notice: One of the standards which labor unions can and are demanding of employers integrating AI into the workplace is advanced notice of incoming technology, in order to ensure that workers have time to adapt their skillset and prepare for re-education processes.
Collective Bargaining Agreements and AI: These are the agreements between employers and unionized employees regarding labor standards and conditions, which can include clauses such as the before stated ‘advanced notice’ of incoming technology, among many other things.
This is also where unions can set standards and limits on the use of AI in the workplace and in their field of work.
In the case of the writer’s strike what this means is that writers are seeking to limit or entirely prohibit the use of AI for writing, editing and rewriting material and to prohibit the use of writer’s material to train AI to generate content in the same style.
Unions are advocating for a human centered approach to creative work in which AI is used to assist and augment the work of humans.
Continue Reading about the AI transition and the ways it will effect how we live, work, and think.