Op-Ed ~ AI won't take your job; it's somebody using AI that will take your job.
AI, or Artificial Intelligence, is one of the hottest topics, especially when discussing the future of jobs as we know them. Some people are worried that AI might replace human workers. With that in mind, I found an enlightening Business Insider article by economist Richard Baldwin with a different idea: AI won't steal your job if you know how to use it.
Baldwin, who teaches at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland, thinks AI can actually help workers do their jobs better. He likes to think of AI as a kind of "wisdom in a can" that can make every worker, even average ones, more powerful.
Imagine a nurse using an AI tool in a hospital. This tool could help them understand a patient's health data better, predict possible health problems, and make a plan to keep the patient healthy. This would make the nurse's job easier and help them care for their patients better. Let's think about someone working in a vineyard where grapes for wine are grown. If they used AI, they could use data from the soil, the weather, and past harvests to determine the best time to pick the grapes. This would help them make better wine. And what about someone who works at an advertising agency? They could use AI to analyze lots of data about consumers to create ads that those consumers would really be interested in.
AI can help average workers perform as well as professionals with many years of experience; tools like ChatGPT from OpenAI can make this possible.
Everybody acknowledges that AI can substantially change jobs, which can be disruptive. Even so, many experts think AI can make workers more productive. People are already using AI tools in many different jobs. Smart companies are starting to look at how well their employees use AI when they review their performance.
As AI tools get better and better, some tasks that are boring and repetitive will probably be done by machines. But we should be hopeful about this. Workers can learn to deal with these changes, and AI can actually make jobs better instead of taking them away.
—Shaun
