AI Prospects

AI is becoming the story of the decade. Past industrial revolutions have featured water, steam, railways, electricity, internal combustion engines and computers. Now it looks as if AI is in the process of triggering a new stage, one that can boost productivity and wealth as the previous stages did.

 According to a poll of UK businesses, the most widely anticipated benefit offered by AI is time savings (54%), followed by productivity efficiencies (42%) and cost savings (42%). Together, these three form the practical backbone of AI’s perceived value: freeing up time, boosting efficiency, and reducing costs. 

 However, one cannot help but notice that all of those previous stages of the ongoing Industrial Revolution involved job losses as mechanical power replaced manpower. Freeing up time, boosting efficiency, and reducing costs involve using less labour, and that means fewer jobs.

 The jobs most immediately at risk from AI are those with repetitive, rule-based, or data-heavy tasks. This includes roles like data entry clerks, telemarketers, basic customer service representatives, and some roles in manufacturing and transportation. Additionally, jobs in finance, legal, and market research are also facing increased automation.

 ChatGPT has shown itself capable of writing pop songs, news stories, and fiction, as well as trawling instantly through records to do the heavy lifting of research for business reports and academic papers. It can write books as well as book reviews.

 At the moment it is standing alongside and behind us to make what we do easier and faster, and to suggest avenues we might pursue. This does indeed make is more efficient. It does the boring stuff and leaves us more time to think about creative things. The trick is to ask it the right questions and feed back its answers into more precise and detailed ones.

 Yes, there were job losses at every stage of previous revolutions, but the wealth that came in the wake of the increased productivity they generated led to many more new jobs that added more value. Most of the jobs our predecessors did 100 years ago do not exist today, and most of the jobs we do now did not exist then.

 There are alarmists who want men with red flags to walk in front of AI to slow it down and prevent it from providing ‘unfair’ competition. But they will lose, as they have at every previous stage. The potential rewards are too great.

Madsen Pirie

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