Will AI Make Human Workers Obsolete?
Here’s my fear: Soon I won’t be writing these columns.
Ciaran, my managing editor, will gather up the last decade of my writings and musings, feed the lot into ChatGPT, and then tell it, “Write me a story in the style of Jeff Opdyke about the good, the bad, and the ugly of an AI future.”
Sadly, ChatGPT can already do that.
If you haven’t heard of ChatGPT, it’s a new, free online artificial intelligence tool that’s taken the world by storm. With just a few simple prompts, it can produce cogent essays on esoteric topics or even write computer code for websites.
ChatGPT isn’t necessarily so good at producing articles in the voice of a real person like me because it’s knowledge base kinda sucks at the moment. It cannot analyze and forecast future events. Moreover, it doesn’t have my historical knowledge about, well, myself and my experiences. So whatever it spits out will be flat and dull—like a marginally more interesting Wikipedia page.
Nevertheless, this technology hints at a future barreling toward us—a future obese with opportunity, but fraught with personal peril.
By now, you know that artificial intelligence is exploding. It’s everywhere. You can’t pick up a newspaper or watch a business TV show and not hear about the myriad ways AI is either currently threatening or will soon threaten to upend this industry and that.
All over TikTok, influencers are offering all sorts of tips and tricks on how to manipulate AI to your own advantage. One girl used AI to tailor a resume for 20 different job offers. She got invited to interviews for all of them. Investors are earning thousands of dollars per week using AI to create trading bots for the stock, crypto, and currency markets.
Still others have built new businesses using AI to create marketing campaigns for companies, which in turn are firing their marketing teams because AI does a far better job with on-point messaging and implementing social media strategies.
It’s truly stunning.
As I was in the Vienna airport on the way to Tel Aviv on Sunday, I stumbled upon a story with this headline: “Jobs are now requiring experience with ChatGPT—and they’ll pay as much as $800,000 a year for the skill.”
That’s absolutely insane!
And yet…
How long will those jobs really last?
The irony is that AI puts AI jobs at risk.
Why can’t AI learn to examine a company’s spending, its marketing efforts, and its income statement, then determine on its own that the company needs to do X, Y, and Z to ramp up its profitability… and then execute that plan on its own as well?
Guaranteed that day is coming.
Today’s AI-centric jobs are going to die because AI is going to make them redundant.
And have you seen the art that AI is creating?
Honestly, we’re probably already at a point where a bride with a tad bit of programming knowledge could feed scores of photos of herself and the groom into an AI engine, along with various pictures of the venue where they’re getting married, and then tell the AI to gin up a traditional collection of wedding photos featuring the couple and their chosen venue.
And maybe she tells it to create the photos in the style of famed portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz.
Out pops a portfolio of perfectly styled wedding photos at no cost, as though Annie Leibovitz attended the wedding with all her gear.
So much for wedding photography.
The opportunity here, for us, is that tech companies building the guts of our AI future are going to generate fortunes for those who invest in their stocks. They already are. Nvidia, the maker of computer graphics cards, has caught fire among investors. Since bottoming at $120 last fall, Nvidia is now north of $420 per share on the back of the AI wave.
High-end graphics cards process tons of data at breathtakingly fast speeds, which happens to be perfect not just for video gaming but for the data-crunching that AI demands.
We’re going to see an untold number of companies emerge in coming years that are explicitly tied to AI niches in gaming, business, social media, etc. Some will no doubt fail and fade away—the Pets.com of artificial intelligence. Others are going to be the next Microsoft… and it might well be Microsoft itself, since it already has an AI solutions department working with corporate and consumer accounts. Microsoft is also the backer of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.
At the same time, however, there are vast social risks from AI.
What happens when every fast food joint in America is run by AI algorithms that are monitoring every aspect of every system at every second within an eatery that is 100% manned by robots under the control of those AI systems?
A great swath of America will have no marketable skills in a future run by AI.
Where do they go for an income when all those low-wage jobs are gone?
Where do wedding photographers go? Where do marketing executives land?
Hollywood writers are on strike right now specifically because they see the writing on the digital wall and want to unplug AI before “AI” is the writing team behind your next favorite sitcom or Jason Bourne movie.
What I’m getting at here is that this brave new world of artificial intelligence is going to change society and the economy in the most profound way since the Industrial Revolution.
It’s going to force new forms of government to emerge, and new ways of providing for societal good when jobs no longer need humans.
We’re at the very start of this. Right now, it’s all shiny and new, and people are making hundreds of thousands of dollars exploiting this new technological wonder.
But the dark side is coming.
And that’s going to create a world of hurt, discord, dissention, and social upheaval.
Question is: Can governments and society get ahead of AI before AI learns to control and better its own environment without the need of pesky human intervention?
At that point, we’d no longer be the planet’s apex predator.
(Note to my managing editor, Ciaran, forget you ever read this.)
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