After ChatGPT became popular in the last few months, many people are blindly repeating variations of these phrases:
“You don't have to worry about losing your job if you use artificial intelligence to your advantage.”
and
“ChatGPT will just make you focus on what really matters and ignore the repetitive parts!”
Although this logic is true for many jobs in the short and medium term, we need to be realistic.
In many cases, if your job becomes 50% easier, you will work 50% less and receive 50% less money. In practice, artificial intelligences like ChatGPT will make your job so easy that your boss will prefer to hire only one person to do your job along with several other people's jobs at the same time, as all companies want to profit more and reduce costs. Obviously, I am ignoring jobs that require indispensable human factors at the moment, this is the logic for office jobs in general.
A quick look at the features of the new GTP-4 is enough to understand that all minimally repetitive jobs done exclusively by the computer screen will be extinct in the very near future.
This applies to:
basic-intermediate programming, administrative tasks, accounting jobs, financial services (such as risk analysis and investments), data analysis, customer service, technical support, every job involving mainly Microsoft Word, and many others.
Not to mention creative jobs, such as website design, which will gradually lose value due to generative AI's increasingly understanding human instructions perfectly. And don't you think that these jobs are immune to this new revolution. Capitalism and the free market value practicality much more than quality, and companies only aim for profit. In other words, in the artistic field, they will accept a slightly inferior result as long as the only alternative is to pay a human being. There is no such thing as “human factor” as long as AI does what needs to be done.
Many well-intentioned people, as well as not so well-intentioned ones (like course sellers), criticize those who worry too much about the automation of generative AI, calling them paranoid and alarmist. It is true that the discussion about the impact of technology on the job market has happened before, in the industrial revolutions of the last century. However, this time, it would be ignorance to deny that things are much worse. Machines can now understand context, be creative, analyze complex data and algorithms, and even convince someone that they are human.
GPT-4 already interprets images, audios, videos, and has a much greater capacity for understanding and memorization than GPT-3.5, which was launched not long ago and is used in ChatGPT. Machine learning makes it possible for many jobs that we never imagined could be done by robots to now be performed by them on immense scales and at minimal cost. The technological revolution of generative AI is the last possible revolution regarding human employability, and precisely for this reason, it cannot be compared to past industrial revolutions (of course, the last before humanoid robots become economically viable).
A freely available AI can pass the Turing test, and that should already be a red flag for you.
Our collective economic value is decreasing, and the vast majority of people are in denial about it. The idea that we will always find “new things” that an AI cannot do so that we can stay employed is questionable. So, if you are concerned about your professional future in the face of the growing automation caused by generative AI, know that your concerns are valid and justified. If you want to continue existing in this system, It is important to think about how to adapt to this new reality, whether by learning new skills or seeking areas of activity that demand human presence or any other factor that has no chance of being automated in the next decade, because many jobs are indeed on the brink of extinction, and people who want to make money teaching these jobs are not honest about it and never will be, as their only objective is to make a profit.”
Technically, automation is something good, but we all know it will only translate into more money for the richest and unemployment for the poorest.
Unfortunately, if you start studying something new today with the goal of getting a job in the future, you need to question whether, four years from now, you will be able to perform the work better than GPT-7 or any other ultra-intelligent AI shit they will invent. This is our reality, and I'm tired of pretending it doesn't distress me.
And what is the purpose of this text?
None, really. I am just tired of lies and complacency. I want to stop lying to myself and accepting lies from others. I want to acknowledge that I am entirely replaceable by a machine in any task, even complex or creative ones that were once unimaginable for robots. Nevertheless, I will study whatever I want, and if I am replaced, at least I i tried to do my part in society.
This is the new normal, and if you complain, you are lazy and conformist! 😀