I'm not holding my breath while waiting for an AI based solution that can go to elderly patient's home, give them medicine, clean their house and help them with other daily activities. This would require highly advanced robotics and ability to maneuver in varying physical environments, so far we have nothing even close to that.
I believe AI might instead replace a lot of work done by journalists, software devs, managers and other office workers who mainly produce and manipulate text. Then there people may be re-educated to become care workers.
I think this is actually highly feasible... I mean who better to talk to machines and write code at a deeper machine-level than the machine itself? They have bots now that can write whole news stories, coding wouldn't be that difficult for a sophisticated AI to do in 10-20 years from now. Medical doctors, and even lawyers may be displaced by AI at least in part. It's not just service jobs that will be going away, just wait till the high earning jobs start being automated away.
This is were most goes wrong and you fall in the same trap.
You seem to assume there are jobs which 1) AI won't be able to do and sooner or later 2) that the things that humans will be able to do for a while yet which AI wont requires specialized education.
But thats not how things work.
As I mentioned somewhere else. A cleaning lady is going to have her job longer than a radiologist. Everyone can become a cleaning lady and thus there is going to be oversupply of people who can clean.
Is there really a lot of AI replacing highly trained professionals? There is a lot of hype around the idea, but I don't see any evidence of it happening in large scale. Using an AI tool will increase efficiency of course, but we've always had new developments that increase efficiency.
People undervalue how radically the word processor and spreadsheet changed how offices are run. But it didn't lead to a mass layoff of office workers.
I bet not even a single doctor has lost his job to AI yet.
An AI that could replace a software developer can likely replace all forms of white collar work. Not a whole lot left after that. I can't imagine that any new job category that such an AI would enable would need humans either.
I'm hoping that this will be the 'solution' if AI eats many jobs. With an ageing population there's plenty of caring to be done. Hopefully society will figure out a way to value it more, so that it becomes a proper, first-class career-option/alternative rather than underpaid low-skilled work, or something that people find themselves obliged to do.
AI is not going to build and repair roads, or houses, or pretty much anything else physical any time soon, nor is it going to replace nurses, cooks, shop assistants, or any number of other occupations that require human interaction. Even the vast majority of assembly lines, warehouses, etc. still rely on human labour because turns out building and maintaining robots is expensive and difficult, and even the best robots are bad at manipulating the real world with the kind of flexibility a human can (AI, or lack thereof, is not the main bottleneck here).
What you're talking about is the stuff of distant future speculative fiction that may or may not happen some day, but if it does it sure won't be heralded in by ChatGPT.
People talk a lot about AI replacing a bunch of professional occupations but to some extent I've always internalized that as some futurist BS that might eventually happen.
You just described that AI will help... But not do the job. I think that's the definition for job. Anything that the person is left doing is the job part. Anything machines or AI etc does is not the job anymore. As machines help more, jobs become different.
The only problem tho, is if the person becoming obsolete cannot retrain to something else.
I personally don't believe this to be true - humans are insanely adaptable. Learning new skills is part of it.
If an AI is able to automate and produce everything humans need, there would still be jobs that need a human. For example, prostitution. Or premium service jobs like butlers, etc.
Well, that's my main opposition to "AI will replace [insert any profession]". Many jobs are so specific it will never be economical to hire a team of software+AI specialist to create and maintain the software to automate that work. Plus the fact that the said specialists usually know nothing about the domain.
Will AI generate new jobs? I can’t really imagine what those new jobs would be. The seem to be more like the popularity of automatic forums in medical settings: they made it so doctors didn’t need to hire a person to do all their paperwork for them, but it burdens them to do all their own paperwork.
I certainly think that people who use AI will replace people who don't. People that don't use AI won't be able to keep up, and the gap is only going to get wider. I find the claim that AI will replace jobs outright pretty dubious, it's clickbait.
I believe AI might instead replace a lot of work done by journalists, software devs, managers and other office workers who mainly produce and manipulate text. Then there people may be re-educated to become care workers.
reply