Written by Tianqi (George) Sun
Artificial intelligence has drastically taken the world by storm when ChatGPT was released. It has brought light to software developers’ work for decades. Everyone seems to have some use for the chat bot. To some students, the emergence of AI felt like paradise, because it saved them from writing their papers and it does their homework for them. It revolutionized the education system. Teachers now have to think of ways to integrate AI into the classroom to encourage a learning environment instead of suppressing the use of it as AI gets more and more humanlike. To some lawyers, the emergence of AI felt the opposite, when one lawyer got over reliant on AI and cited a case that did not exist (Jon, 2023). However, the impact of artificial intelligence extends far beyond these examples: Some worry that artificial intelligence might take over the jobs in society, while others think the improvement increases the efficiency of workers.
The viewpoint that artificial intelligence is taking over our jobs comes from the fact that the workers will not be able to adjust quickly enough to the rapid improvements of technology. It will replace jobs such as a paralegal, content writer, travel advisor, graphic designer, etc (Mok, 2023). Since these jobs are no longer required, people who used to work in these jobs need to obtain new training for other jobs in order to fit in the economic landscape. However, that means sometimes people need to give up years of training from high school, university, professional school, etc. There is a great cost in retraining the skills that are needed in the new era. They might need to potentially go to university again and accumulate more student loans which were already hard to pay back when they first did so. If they do not retrain, unemployment or income bracket downgrade will be the only options. Governments currently are not providing enough incentive for people to learn about the logistics of artificial intelligence and how to use the tool in real life. There are not enough training programs for people to adjust to the new AI world. It makes people who are already working in low-income professions even harder to develop skills and empower themselves economically. Since the 2000s, automation systems have already eliminated 1.7 million jobs. This number is only going to increase as AI plays a bigger role in everyone’s lives. Some have predicted that AI is going to take away 85 million jobs by 2025 (Narayan, 2023).
The contrasting view believes that the technology will drastically improve the condition of the economy because AI will increase the efficiency of workers. One logic behind this is that the production-possibility frontier (graphical representation showing all the possible options of output for two goods) is shifted outward by improvement of technology, meaning that the possible goods that can be produced is more since workers do things more efficiently. For instance, in a few years when AI’s development matures more and models become more accurate, lawyers won’t cite false cases and instead will spend considerably less time preparing for a case since AI is doing all the research in seconds, pulling up similar past cases. This can significantly speed up the law system process and increase the efficiency of courts so that they could go through more cases each year (Mok, 2023). To make a bold prediction, since the dataset to train AI will expand more and more, it can even help make decisions for judges on a more unbiased standpoint based on the previous cases in the near future. Instead of AI replacing jobs, humans will take on more advanced decision-making jobs to increase efficiency. Like the industrial revolution, people thought the appearance of machines would take over industries such as textile production and agricultural work (Clark, n.d.). It did the opposite. The Gross Domestic Product per capita world average doubled in the 1800s, showing technological improvements shifting the supply curve out, and leaving out more resources for human-beings to explore other options to push society forward (Clark, n.d.).
Is AI taking over jobs? We don’t know. Both viewpoints have their own logic that makes perfect sense. People who support the theory that AI is taking over jobs have less confidence in the smooth transition of labor to support their theory, and people who believe that AI can improve the efficiency of the workers dramatically also have historical evidence like the industrial revolution to reinforce their theory as well. To see which theory will occur in real life is still up in the air. Only time will tell the true impacts of AI on economic growth. Before then, to adjust to the change in this rapidly growing technology based era, the only thing we can do is to empower as many people as possible economically.
References
Clark, G. (n.d.). The Industrial Revolution – UC davis. UC Davis. https://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/HEG%20-%20final%20draft.pdf
Jon Brodkin – Jun 23, 2023 5:32 pm UTC. (2023, June 23). Lawyers have real bad day in court after citing fake cases made up by Chatgpt. Ars Technica. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/lawyers-have-real-bad-day-in-court-after-citing-fake-cases-made-up-by-chatgpt/
Mok, A. (2023). Chatgpt may be coming for our jobs. here are the 10 roles that AI is most likely to replace. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-jobs-at-risk-replacement-artificial-intelligence-ai-labor-trends-2023-02
Narayan, K. (2023). Is ai a job killer or a job creator? what history tells Us. The Economic Times. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/jobs/hr-policies-trends/is-ai-a-job-killer-or-a-job-creator-what-history-tells-us/articleshow/104728338.cms