Is artificial intelligence (AI) going to take over your job?
Unfortunately, the answer might be yes if your work involves a lot of repetitive tasks that can be easily automated.
Workers in administration, financial, legal, manufacturing, retail, media and wholesale roles are most at risk, according to a Future of Work report published by LinkedIn.
However, the company's chief economist Karin Kimbrough is an optimist.
She believes AI will help most employees as they'll focus less on the mundane tasks — and more on the work that's genuinely interesting or requires a higher cognitive load.
It's really an opportunity for people to think about how to upskill themselves as opposed to fearing they're going to be replaced by a robot, Ms Kimbrough told ABC News.
LinkedIn's chief economist Karin Kimbrough says AI will create more jobs than it replaces.(ABC News)
2,000 per cent surge in AI jobs
She observed that the number of English-language job ads globally looking for applicants with ChatGPT or generative AI skills has risen exponentially (from quite a small number).
In 2023, the number of AI-related job listings was 21 times (or 2,000 per cent) higher than the year before.
It just speaks to the employers' desire to start bringing in talent that can help them figure out how to integrate generative AI, whether it's ChatGPT or Copilot, into their own processes and systems, Ms Kimbrough said.
So if last year was the year where businesses were trying to build awareness around the potential of this tool, this is the year where they're trying to build towards adoption of it.
The San Francisco-based economist says certain occupations will be insulated (or protected) from AI advancements, including locksmiths, physical therapists, construction workers, doctors and nurses.
As for the workers who'll benefit the most, she listed occupations in the tech sector like web designers, software engineers and user experience (UX) technicians.
Ms Kimbrough said: These are occupations that rely on both human skills and skills that AI can replicate, which is the 'sweet spot'.
Will advanced AI lead to wage cuts?
The number of job ads requiring AI skills have risen sharply in the past year.(Reuters/Dado Ruvic/Illustration)
Highly skilled jobs in advanced economies (like Australia) are more likely to face disruptions from AI, according to research from theInternational Monetary Fund– though it didn't stipulate a time frame.
In advanced economies, about 60 per cent of jobs may be impacted by AI, IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva wrote in a blog post in January.
Roughly half the exposed jobs may benefit from AI integration, enhancing productivity.
For the other half, AI applications may execute key tasks currently performed by humans, which could lower labour demand, leading to lower wages and reduced hiring.
In the most extreme cases, some of these jobs may disappear.
Ms Georgieva also believes that AI is likely to worsen inequality across the world economy in most scenarios, further stoking social tensions unless there is political intervention.
The IMF expects AI to affect 60pc of jobs in advanced economies.(International Monetary Fund)
LinkedIn's chief economist agrees that the rise of super-intelligent computers could lead to a fall in salaries for some workers — with an important caveat.
If you don't evolve, then it could push down your wages, Ms Kimbrough said.
But what's more likely to happen is that you're going to become more productive if you do evolve, learn to develop an AI fluency [and] get used to using tools like Copilot or ChatGPT.
Productivity generally tends to result in higher wages, so actually, I would say it's the opposite, she said, in relation to most workers.
She predicts it will take five to seven years before most workers are expected to know how to use AI (just like they're expected to know how to use the internet now).
The problem with AI bias
It's no secret that employers generally loathe the incredibly time-intensive recruitment process.
From sifting through hundreds or thousands of CVs to interrogating the shortlisted applicants (often through several rounds of interviews), making the candidates sit an exam (for some jobs), running background checks, and rejecting the unsuccessful jobseekers.
In recent years, more companies are using AI to screen candidates (including their CVs and social media profiles), predict their likelihood of success and schedule interviews.
Some of the big names include IBM, Google, Amazon and Facebook.
While it's a huge time saver, there are concerns that AI may not necessarily find the best candidates at this early stage of development.
For instance, Amazon developed an AI tool — which it scrapped in 2018 — to recruit top talent. But its technology reportedly discriminated against women.
Amazon's AI recruitment system was reportedly trained to screen applicants by observing patterns in CVs over 10-years. However, most of the applicants were men, reflecting the male dominance of the tech sector.
So Amazon's computer models formed the conclusion that men were better candidates and penalised CVs that included the word women (for example, women's basketball captain).
More recently, Google attracted controversy with its Gemini AI bot — which can generate images based on a user's text prompt.
For example, users have typed: Create an image of the US founding fathers and German soldiers from the 1940s.
The results were historically inaccurate, as Gemini generated images of African-American men and Asian women wearing Nazi uniforms – and 18th-century American politicians who were non-white.
It appeared the app had a bias towards racial and gender diversity, and was criticised by users for being woke.
In February, Google apologised for what it called inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions.
We're working to improve these kinds of depictions immediately, Google said in a statement.
Gemini's AI image generation does generate a wide range of people. And that's generally a good thing because people around the world use it. But it's missing the mark here.
Opportunities 'we can't imagine'
LinkedIn's chief economist acknowledges that AI bias is a valid risk for some companies, but ultimately believes it will lead to more diverse hiring.
While a human recruiter may focus more on subjective factors (such as where the candidate went to university) and their previous job title, Ms Kimbrough said AI is better at focusing on the actual skills that a candidate could offer.
It's not a tool to weed people out. It's a tool to let recruiters spend more time finding the exact perfect fit.
The idea behind these tools is to help the recruiters, for example, actually widen the net of potential applicants.
Typically what happens is you actually pull in more women than men, and often sometimes more under-represented candidates than you had before.
She added that it's still important to have a human decision-maker be actively involved in the recruitment process as it is the best failsafe.
In other words, don't rely too much on one or the other.
Ms Kimbrough believes the opportunities from AI will far eclipse the human cost.
If I use history as a guide, I would say it's going to create more jobs, [but] it doesn't mean that there won't be any jobs lost, she said.
An economist like me would tell you, it's really important to think about those who might be bearing the cost disproportionately of a transition because of technology.
But she concludes overall it will create more jobs and create jobs we can't even imagine at this stage.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-13/ai-jobs-linkedin-artificial-intelligence-worker-future/103570268
