You probably won’t remember, but a year or so ago I wrote a column about ‘AI’. Thinking I was clever at the time, the curveball was, if you reached the final sentence was that it was written by ChatGPT.
I have since learned that the ‘quality’ of said AI produced work is down, in the main, to the depth of the prompt.
Arguably, for the prompt to be robust for such a column, it would be more than 500 words, which leaves me in a position where I may as well write it myself as it renders the technological input redundant.
The findings, on the face of it, seem to be that the more refined, highbrow, and arguably higher paid jobs are most at risk which, for those seeking the impossible aim of true social equality, will do little than make us all as equally unskilled and lowly paid as the corporations enhance AI and hoover up even more excess profits on which to gorge with their shareholders.
Interpreters and translators are top of the shop, ranked as 98% ‘exposed’, which must be a knife in the heart to those finishing an expensive linguistic degree at a red brick university.
Historians and mathematicians are also due to suffer immeasurably as are ‘writers and authors’ on 85%.
‘Farm’ educators, DJs and web developers will soon become a thing of the past as we go fully automated in those fields.
This is despite the glaring oversight that there’s no substitute for human emotion, opinion, laughter and nuance, which, if we take disc jockeys as an example, will be made redundant in lieu of song after advert after song as we wonder why our kids have further lost the ability to converse with others.
Yes, it’s the natural order of things for change to come to pass, and, much as I am a paid-up subscriber of various AI sites, more out of a thirst to learn than anything, AI is little more than the devils’ tool, much as mobile phones have been and are, but they aren’t going anywhere soon, so live with it all we must.
Then we look at the jobs that are ‘safe’ from the march of AI and, unsurprisingly, it is manual labour and/or low paid unskilled jobs which go to prove they really are backbone of a society: floor sanders and railway maintenance staff are at no risk whatsoever of going to the wall as are gas and oil labourers, roofers, dishwashers and highway maintenance staff.
Yes, automation has and does ‘assist’ such jobs with the heavy lifting, but the human touch can never be replicated in such fields and, as more become redundant in the skilled jobs these jobs will become more frequent and arguably the cost of labour will drop even further as we bemoan allowing AI to infiltrate every element of our lives, as it will do…
- Brett Ellis is a teacher.
