Which jobs are at risk from AI?

p_anotherguy

With AI on the rise, which jobs do you think are at risk? Which would you personally avoid?

Exodi

Lots of reporting on this already -

Translation, content creation, coding, data entry. marketing, customer service, legal, etc. Plenty of articles about it.

Given that 'AI' is mostly referring to language models, it's jobs which revolve around the creation, manipulation or interpretation of text.

Physical or strategic jobs are likely fine for a while (physical jobs may be replaced by machinery as has always been the case, but not technically 'AI').

ButterCheese

The pitch that we received at work was basically "you can use it to be more productive".  But there still needs to be human supervision to check the work and to maintain responsibliity for whatever it has been asked to do.

More binary functions such as coding are a good example; you can ask AI to write code for a specific purpose, and the time saved means you can do something else.  But you've then got to test the code, manually make tweaks if something doesn't work (which involves finding the error in the first place), then apply the code to the application in question, then you're still responsible for how it works.  As part of a bigger, wider project, AI can only save you time on specific aspects of a project.

Remember when we first had speak-to-text technology?  Everyone thought it was the best thing since sliced bread.  But our staff found that it only helped a small bit, they'd still have to go through the text (meeting minutes for example) and correct a load of stuff, take out the "ummm" and "eerrrmm" phrases and anything else that it had chosen to translate unecessarily to text.

MattMattMattUK

p_anotherguy said:

With AI on the rise, which jobs do you think are at risk? Which would you personally avoid?

Ultimately every job depending on the freedom we give them. That could could take between five and fifty years, providing we do not wipe ourselves out before we get there. The main thing is that AI for highly paid jobs makes more sense for menial tasks, it takes a lot of hours of minimum wage to pay for the AI and resultant hardware platform to utilise the software (e.g. a robotic street rubbish picking machine), however it takes a lot less hours to generate a system for a purely digital interaction, which could include customer services via web or phone, there are already AI lawyer models which appear as good as and often better than human lawyers, AI surgeons are already faster and make pretty much zero errors when working on pigs, the list goes on. 

ButterCheese

AI customer service is just following a model that has been in place for years, i.e. reading off a script and providing a centralised, inferior service.  All that happens now is that AI picks out the words you speak, looks them up against a list of FAQs and returns a pre-associated response.  So it makes perfect sense (for the provider, but not the customer) to replace a minimum wage employee with AI in this case. 

For some routine operations, robotic systems are used but I'd query if this was actual AI rather than just automated proceedures based on visual cues (much like driverless cars).  It is much more time consuming to teach it to learn, because every person's intestines might look different.  Plus you might need additional people like urologists, hepatologists, general surgeons present to make a decision if something is not straight forward.

Brie

Anything to do with transportation - driving, flying, railways.  
Anything in the arts - writing music or poetry, acting.
Anything that is routine - look how many chatbots are used instead of people for customer service.  And even those people who remain are having their work managed by AI so they can be answering 10 queries at once.
A lot of things that are done badly by people - a person not trained in gardening for instance will not often distinguish between a wanted plant and an unwanted week.  AI will be just as bad for a while yet.

Savvy_Sue

ButterCheese said:

For some routine operations, robotic systems are used but I'd query if this was actual AI rather than just automated proceedures based on visual cues (much like driverless cars).  It is much more time consuming to teach it to learn, because every person's intestines might look different.  Plus you might need additional people like urologists, hepatologists, general surgeons present to make a decision if something is not straight forward.

Listening to the radio today, AI surgeon which has just removed an organ from a (dead) pig needed a human to pass tools to it!

lincroft1710

Dog walkers should be OK!

prowla

ButterCheese said:

AI customer service is just following a model that has been in place for years, i.e. reading off a script and providing a centralised, inferior service.  All that happens now is that AI picks out the words you speak, looks them up against a list of FAQs and returns a pre-associated response.  So it makes perfect sense (for the provider, but not the customer) to replace a minimum wage employee with AI in this case. 

For some routine operations, robotic systems are used but I'd query if this was actual AI rather than just automated proceedures based on visual cues (much like driverless cars).  It is much more time consuming to teach it to learn, because every person's intestines might look different.  Plus you might need additional people like urologists, hepatologists, general surgeons present to make a decision if something is not straight forward.

"Hi, I'm your AI assistant, please enter your question"

> Talk to a person

"I'll be glad to help you, please enter your question"

> Talk to a person

"I see you want to talk to a person, is that right?"

> Talk to a person