It's the First Monday in May, a definition that for fashion enthusiasts has become synonymous with the "Oscars of fashion" – to put it more simply, the Met Gala.
Glitz and glamour combine today in the fundraising dinner that has turned in the last decade into "the Super Bowl of social fashion events," as the late André Leon Talley called it. The attendees of the event (dedicated this year to the late Karl Lagerfeld) are, as usual, a selected few, consisting primarily of notable the affluent and influential figures. They shall go to the ball.
For all the rest of us, instead, today it's International Workers' Day and perhaps we may take a moment to stop and ponder a bit about the impact Artificial Intelligence (AI) may have on the job market in future.
The fast technological advancements in this field are already bringing the first changes in a variety of fields. In medicine and healthcare there seems to be tangible progresses on a regular basis: we now know that AI software is able to outperform detecting different types of cancers. New systems are also being developed: an AI tool recently designed by experts at the Royal Marsden NHS foundation trust, the Institute of Cancer Research, London, and Imperial College London can identify, for example, whether abnormal growths found on CT lung scans are cancerous. While this system must still be implemented, this is great news as early detection of cancer is crucial for prompt intervention and a quicker recovery.
In the medical field AI is therefore poised to become a potent asset for medical professionals, providing an invaluable tool for doctors and scientists. While it is unlikely that doctors and scientists will be entirely replaced by machines, doctors should still be paying attention to some recent researches: at the end of April, a study published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine found indeed that ChatGPT produced good or very good quality responses and showed more empathy towards patients compared to doctors.
Besides, AI has the ability to accurately diagnose a patient's condition based on their symptoms and test results. Try assessing ChatGPT's medical abilities in this way: if you have a disorder that took years to be diagnosed, make a list of the detailed symptoms you had on ChatGPT and in seconds you will have the correct diagnosis. While a ChatGPT diagnosis still requires validation through other tests and checkups and the opinion of a professional, it opens up a new realm of possibilities in the medical field pointing at a hybrid model that combines the strengths of both human professionals and AI technology (potentially, it could save time and money – imagine your GP narrowing down the possible diagnoses with ChatGPT and requesting fewer and more specific tests for a patient).
Yet, not everyone is enthusiastic about AI. Artists and graphic designers are concerned that AI systems may be trained on datasets that include their original work, allowing the technology to infringe copyrights and incorporate their styles, inspirations, and ideas to create new images, something that, in teh long run, may lead to replacing them. Fashion houses are experimenting with AI, but at times seem to be struggling to keep up with the speed and accuracy of untrained individuals who seem to be able to effortlessly create innovative collections. Journalists, lecturers, and translators are also facing challenges from powerful text generation systems like ChatGPT, which can produce nearly perfect texts (although there may be some errors or "hallucinations," as AI learns over time).
As new systems emerge, one of the outcomes is a shift in the employment landscape: it happened with industrialization and it is happening now.
The remarkable feature of Artificial Intelligence is its capacity for perpetual learning based on input data, which confers upon it boundless potential for improvement at a very fast speed. Consequently, it is conceivable that autonomous AI could surpass the expertise of even the most accomplished human specialists, rendering certain jobs superfluous.
Many jobs will inevitably be displaced (different wage levels are interested, with higher-wage occupations generally presenting more tasks with high exposure), among them those ones in which vast quantities of data are analysed by a human (think about human resources workers going through CVs to choose the best candidate, but also researchers and journalists, so professionals from the information processing industries). But there are other sectors that will be impacted, namely transports, customer services, retail workers, cashiers, couriers, and receptionists.
Asked to provide a list of jobs that will be lost because of AI, ChatGPT included among the others Data entry clerks, Telemarketers, Bookkeepers and accounting clerks; Factory workers, Cashiers and retail sales associates; Travel agents, Loan officers, Receptionists and information clerks; Newspaper reporters and editors, Retail managers, Post office clerks and mail carriers; Warehouse workers, and Bank tellers.
More jobs will be create, though, especially for machine learning specialists and for those workers willing to be retrained and move into IT. New figures will emerge, including prompt engineers (a recent job ad for a full-time position as Prompt Engineer and Prompt Librarian in San Francisco at Anthropic, an AI safety and research company, offered a salary range between $280k and $375k).
According to ChatGPT, among the jobs AI will create or enhance there are AI and machine learning engineers, Robotics engineers and technicians; Cybersecurity specialists, Virtual reality designers and developers; Digital marketing specialists, Renewable energy technicians and engineers, Environmental scientists and specialists; Augmented reality developers and designers, Human-robot interaction specialists, Digital forensics analysts and Creative professionals such as writers, artists, and musicians who work with AI tools and platforms to enhance their work.
Yet at the moment it is still too early to rely completely on AI: ChatGPT included editors in the first list, but we will still need human figures to check upon work created by an AI system that may still be prone to hallucinate, be unable to grasp the nuances of language (in case of translations) or, in the case of AI text-to-image generators, produce biased images (write a generic prompt asking for "a fashion model" in Midjourney and you will most likely get a skinny white young woman, something that perpetuates existing biases).
In all likelihood, we can expect to witness a two-fold transformation: initially, a gradual shift as companies strive to comprehend the potential of AI and its applicability in their operations; followed by a more rapid transition as companies begin to phase out roles that can be automated and replaced with machines.
At the moment, things may not be so tragic yet as companies are still in a sort of exploratory stage: academics are also making efforts to understand how to use powerful artificial intelligence text generators (AITGs) such as ChatGPT in ethical ways to help their students rather than banning them completely from university, and this may generate new courses or new approaches to teaching (some lecturers encourage students to ask the system for its feedback on their essays and texts, or suggest ChatGPT to provide test questions for their revision sessions or synonyms to build a wider dictionary).
As tools such as ChatGPT are currently being integrated in some systems to facilitate certain tasks such as summarizing and translating documents, or creating personalized customer messages, the key stands in understanding the potential of AI in different sectors and determining its optimal use.
Embracing the technology and using AI as a tool (in the end, the calculator did not eliminate our ability to perform calculations but rather increased their speed and emails revolutionized communication making it easier to stay connected with others increasing productivity in both personal and professional spheres) to facilitate a job and enhance existing operations is definitely the solution (coding is easier with ChatGPT, but also editing texts or rewriting documents - think about news agencies basic updates that are often rewritten by journalists; finding synonyms for writers and more condensed solutions for subtitling professional are also faster processes with ChatGPT). This process will also lead us to understand which skills we may want to improve and which ones we will not need anymore.
With the rise of AI we will indeed have to refine our critical thinking to spot eventual mistakes committed by AI (a recent study found that occupations requiring critical thinking skills are less likely to be impacted by current Large Language Models like ChatGPT) and strengthen our problem-solving capabilities, while investing in exclusively human capabilities and emotional intelligence, areas that are less likely to be automated and are in high demand across all industries.
In many ways Artificial Intelligence is both a source of apprehension and excitement, but it is only by enhancing certain skills and expanding selected capabilities that the workforce for the forthcoming era dominated by AI will be prepared.
So, yes, it is the First Monday in May and very few elected ones shall go to the ball. We won't: it looks indeed like it is about time to equip ourselves with the necessary skills to get ready for an ever-evolving labor landscape to stay ahead of the curve rather than waiting for the effects of automation to take hold.
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