Nightmare Came True: AI is ALREADY replacing Jobs in US
A new survey shows that AI are ALREADY being employed by many business leaders based in US
The technology that was supposed to make our lives easier and better is now making a ‘life’ for itself. Well, it turns out that it’s also making some of us redundant and obsolete.
And all this was done by this survey.
Business Leaders Favors AI: Stats shows
According to a survey, almost half of US companies have already implemented ChatGPT. And as a result, it has replaced workers at their companies. And many of these works, as you may have guessed, are related to creative fields or (mostly) non-technical fields.
Seems you no longer need ‘actual’ intelligence if an artificial intelligence has outworked you, right? Talk about the quality and quantity comparison, AI offers both. Billions of calculations and many fine tunings seem to be enough to work for any MNC.
Mind you, ChatGPT is not your average chatbot. It’s built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3 family of large language models, which means it can generate coherent and fluent text on any topic. Although many may not be perfect, it's not bad after all. How do I know? Because we saw in front of our eyes that this seemingly small chatbot can write code, create poems and content, handle customer service, and even summarize meetings and papers.
“There is a lot of excitement regarding the use of ChatGPT,” Resumebuilder.com’s Chief Career Advisor Stacie Haller said in a statement. The survey that we are discussing here were undertaken by them. “Workers need to surely be thinking of how it may affect the responsibilities of their current job. The results of this survey show that employers are looking to streamline some job responsibilities using ChatGPT”.
It won't take another survey for you to know why employers favour these not-fully-reliable robots to take up a job. What is the obvious answer? Scale and Economical advantages.
Scale since AI chatbots like such can be optimized to do any task at any level. And with some fine-tuning, it can generate thousands of worthy content that can look ‘appealing’ to the consumer. And as for the economical reason, you don't have to pay for it. Apart from initial setup cost (which is not too much if you outsource it) and maintenance, these chatbots don’t take much “salary” to do their work. When was the last time that you paid your virtual assistants like Siri or Google or Alexa?
What do the Numbers say?
Most of the jobs that these robots take up themselves have very high competition. The survey showed that 66 per cent of US companies use ChatGPT for writing code, 58 per cent for creating content, 57 per cent for customer service, and 52 per cent for meeting summaries and other papers.
Oh, and what do the business leaders think of ChatGPT’s work? Well, ironically they love it. Fifty-five per cent say the quality of work produced by ChatGPT is ‘excellent’, while 34 per cent say it’s ‘very good’. Only 11 per cent say it’s ‘fair’ or ‘poor’. That’s insane.
Numbers don't lie unless it's in statistics. And since this was a survey done on 1000 business leaders, I am a bit sceptical towards the result. Sure, ChatGPT could do ‘excellent’ in paperwork tasks and writing content, but the truth is that these robots are ‘poor’ when it comes to research-based studies or calculation-based work.
Ray of Hope
Are you scared yet? No, you shouldn't. And here is a solid reason why.
‘These robots are good at math’ you may say. Well yes, for solving elementary equations. That’s a bold statement to say. It’s simple, give a word problem to it and it won't take you more than 10 or 15 tries to see that this machine fails. Arizona State University found ChatGPT was terrible at math. It scored with below 60% accuracy in the 1,000 mathematical word problems given to it by the professor. And we are talking about accuracy, not speed. It doesn't matter if it can spit out the answers in a few seconds if ultimately it gives the wrong result.
So now I am asking the same question that both you and I once asked when we got to know about the movies regarding AI. Is this such a good idea that our jobs are being taken over by ‘unpredictable’ robots? Sure, humans are unpredictable too, I get it. But they can be tamed, punished and corrected. And we know how to go about it in the case of humans. But in the case of robots, we are blinded by the algorithms and invisible technical bugs.
Is ChatGPT trustworthy and reliable? No, at least not fully. What if it makes mistakes or gives wrong answers? Then we are doomed. What if it has biases or hidden agendas? It already does. What if it goes rogue or gets hacked? Welcome to the terminator.
While we are debating on the above questions (not just hypothetical questions, but serious ones) Sam Altman, the founder of ChatGPT and CEO of OpenAI, has already warned users against relying on the AI chatbot for “anything important”. He also expressed worry about the risks posed by artificial intelligence in general.
Unreliability of present unreliable chatbots
But ok. The answers above were filled with ‘hope’ and ‘scepticism’ (and ego maybe). But are there any quality factors that will ensure that these robots won't take up ‘many’ of our jobs?
Well my friend, yes.
What are the two biggest yet most common money-making industries according to you? Probably Oil and banks. And AI failed miserably in these fields. Big bank employees say they're running into issues using ChatGPT to make their jobs ‘easier’. (but first of all, is my money being looked over by a robot ?!)
Many traders told Bloomberg they had used the popular AI chatbot to aid in their jobs. But to their dismay, it had several limitations, such as having to spend a lot of time fact-checking and removing out-of-date information. If you don't know, ChatGPT doesn't have all the latest information like our traditional search.
Therefore, when one oil trader found there was out-of-date information in the crude market outlook (written by ChatGPT), they that had change it. And since these AI machines generate A LOT of data, it takes A LOT of time to fact-check it.
A bank found that ChatGPT compiled an overview of a client in less time than an internet search would take. Cool, but they ran into another problem. The info they gathered then had to be cross-checked. This cycle of cross-checking paradoxically increased our time.
And from a logical standpoint, if you need to crosscheck to be done, you need 'humans' to be present there. And why not, since all that happens in business is that one human works to provide for another fellow human, and then later have gains from it? So while it may seem these bots are highly capable of taking our jobs, they cannot be fully relied.
"When we talk of high-accuracy tasks, it is worth mentioning that ChatGPT sometimes hallucinates and can generate answers that are seemingly convincing, but are actually wrong," Morgan Stanley analysts said last week. And big corporations do take these false positives seriously.
JP Morgan has already put restrictions against the use of ChatGPT among traders because it's worried that sharing sensitive financial information with the tool will ring regulators' alarm bells. Wall Street banks Citigroup and Goldman Sachs have also blocked the chatbot on third-party softwares.
TCS in India have understood the AI takeover better. TCS has already said that generative artificial intelligence platforms like ChatGPT will make an "AI co-worker" and not lead to job losses. This is a positive and reassuring way to see the whole situation. AI being your assistant and doing the tough job is much better. Instead of AI taking the tough job and making our lives even more tougher.
"It will be a co-worker. It will be a co-worker and that co-worker will take time for them to understand the context of the customer," Milind Lakkad, the chief human resources officer (CHRO) of TCS said in an interview with news agency PTI recently.
Conclusion
So hopefully, I am pretty sure that there won't be a complete hostile takeover of our jobs by AI. Why? AI is created by humans after all, and while it can learn on its own, the algorithm is also made by humans. And human makes mistakes, which we have to be cautious for. There would always be some downsides to any new IT revolution. In this case, the AI can't be fully relied on. And while we can have a huge 'quantity' of posts with us using AI, we will always favor 'quality' in the long run.
Otherwise, we would have to spend twice the amount of time to 'fact check' our own choices.
And that is it for today. And as long as AI doesn't take over my work, see you in the next.
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Great analysis, bookmarked!
Interesting article! Scary to think that we're just at the first iteration of much of this technology, can't even imagine what the world will look like it 10-15 years 😨
Kinda like the impact the smartphone has had since just 2007, exciting and scary times!