Impact of AI on employment: Will AI steal my job?
When I told my mentor that my company was going through a round of redundancy, he asked me: “Are you participating in the conversations?”
“If you are part of the conversation, it usually means that you are less likely to be affected by the redundancy.”
“Make sure you are part of the solution. Help your senior leadership figure out how to achieve their top objectives, and your role in it.”
A couple of years later, I’ve survived three rounds of layoffs, and navigated multiple changes in reporting lines as well as senior management. GPTs are on the brink of disrupting industries across the board, and despite the promised productivity gain with the rising AI, many of the global economies find themselves mired in a deepening state of uncertainty.
The silence of Elon Musk’s long pause was deafening, when asked how his kids and their generation would navigate a future world dominated by AI during an interview. It’s awakening, though, to remind us that we are treading on fields where we don’t know what lasting impact our actions and creations would bring. And with AI, the impact might come faster than we had planned for.
Be in the conversation. Be part of the solution.
The same strategy for surviving company personnel reduction works in this scenario too. In fact, it might work even better. In the grand scheme of the market economy and a “competition” between humans and codes, you are not stuck in a role that comes with fixed salary and job responsibilities. Decisions might happen behind closed doors but general trends and milestones have more transparency. If you are willing to put in time and effort, it’s not that hard to find information and materials which provides the latest development, particularly for open source technology. The next step is to digest and think about the implication.
And come back to the base. With new rules in the game, the same old questions remain: What problems are we solving? What goals are we trying to achieve? And how can I be part of the solution that helps to achieve these goals?
My driving instructor asked me today: “since you work in AI, what do you think about this thing that they are saying that AI will steal everyone’s job?”
I am not overly worried about people losing jobs. People always find jobs. People create new jobs. Market economy, where there is demand, there will be supply. We are a mobile, adaptable, versatile species. We live through numerous generations where new technology disrupted agricultural, industrial, infromational and life sciences processes. We might experience growth pain and see farmers or workers whose jobs were affected protesting the change, but eventually the society adapts, faster as we get stronger foundation.
I have no doubt that many jobs that we see today will be replaced AI. Not only manual jobs like cleaning or farming, or hazadous jobs like mining or welding, but also intellectual jobs such as software engineering or data analytics. The volume of certain jobs will decrease as productivity increases with the help of “robots”. I don’t believe, though, that the whole industry will be able to run by itself without human “interface”. Take data analytics for example, it might take 1 person 4 hours to do a job that used to take a team of 5 dedicating a whole month. But this person who spends the 4 hours will probably be doing a job that they never imagined they would be doing 5 years ago. It’s a new role with some new skills, and probably many other transferrable skills like those that would be appreciated in one of those traditional jobs. Who gets to take this job? Someone that understands the new rules in the game, knows the problems to solve and goals to achieve, and is determined to find themselves a place in creating the solution.
Can you be part of a solution?
