The explosive growth of generative AI (artificial intelligence) programs such as ChatGPT and Midjourney is about to change the world — and put a metric shit-ton of people, including marketing creatives, out of their jobs. Are you ready for the revolution?
Mike Rowe, former “Dirty Jobs” host and current host of FOX Business’ “How America Works,” recently issued a warning about AI advancements and what it means for white-collar workers.
“I’ve been hearing for years that robots are going to wreck blue-collar work. Turns out AI is coming for your white-collar job,” Rowe said on “America’s Newsroom.”
Sound far-fetched? Consider this: robots can now write poetry, draw portraits, make movies, code web pages, and do a hell of a lot more than you probably realize — accomplishing in seconds what would take humans hours, days, weeks, or even months to do (and then, probably not as well).
So, how bad will it get?
According to Ben Goertzel, founder and chief executive officer of SingularityNET, AI could potentially replace 80 percent of jobs “in the next few years.”
If you work in the creative field — as a copywriter, graphic designer, photographer, videographer, or music composer — you may already be feeling the heat.
Just last month, I had a contact at a prospective client ask me how to convince marketing leadership not to use ChatGPT instead of hiring a copywriter.
Around the same time, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna announced that his company is pausing hiring for about 7,800 jobs that could be replaced by AI.
“I could easily see 30 percent of [non-customer-facing roles] getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period,” Bloomberg quoted Krishna as saying in an interview.
Is your sphincter puckering yet? Let’s look at the jobs most likely to be replaced by AI in the not-so-distant future.
Jobs most likely to be replaced by AI
It’s generally accepted that among the white-collar professions, lower-skilled workers and those in entry-level positions are facing the greatest risk, no matter the field. The Fox Business article cited repetitive and time-consuming tasks such as data entry and research, for example.
Here are a bunch more. Disconcertingly, several of these have appeared at the tops of “Best Jobs” lists in recent years and have been touted as super-high-growth careers with lucrative salaries:
- Coders/programmers
- Data analysts
- Writers (including copywriters, content writers, technical writers, and journalists)
- Proofreaders and fact-checkers
- Graphic designers
- Finance professionals (including financial analysts and personal financial advisors)
- Bankers and accountants
- Traders
- Legal professionals (paralegals, legal assistants)
- Researchers, including market researchers and business analysts
- Customer service representatives
If you work in one of these jobs — or, come to think of it, if you work for any institution of higher learning that teaches students to do these jobs — it might be time to consider your options.
Time to learn a trade?
Rowe’s advice to white-collar workers in vulnerable positions is: Don’t panic. Instead, use this as an opportunity to start a new career in a skilled job where AI is less likely to eat your lunch.
“We can’t control what AI does. We can’t control a long list of things. But unless our country reinvigorates the trades and unless we start to get a better understanding of where the true opportunities are, why panic about losing your job to AI when you could retrain in six months in a career that’s exploding?” he said.
Gee, thanks, Mike!
You want to keep food on the table and a roof over your head? No problem! Just reinvent yourself as a plumber, electrician, or welder. Find a job that involves manual work, outdoor work, or skills and knowledge that machines don’t have (yet). Your career as you know it is about to vanish into the abyss, but don’t be sad! It’s never too late to start over.
From the article:
“A Goldman Sachs study found that several industries had relatively little exposure to automation by AI technologies, including cleaning; installation, maintenance and repair; construction and extraction; production; and transportation moving. Each had over half of their tasks viewed as not being automatable with AI largely serving as a complementary tool for the remainder of those tasks.”
Wow, “several industries had relatively little exposure to automation by AI”? How promising.
Funny, Fox Business didn’t mention the report’s estimate that globally, 300 million jobs could be lost or diminished due to the rise of AI.
From the report:
“If generative AI delivers on its promised capabilities, the labor market could face significant disruption. Using data on occupational tasks in both the US and Europe, we find that roughly two-thirds of current jobs are exposed to some degree of AI automation, and that generative AI could substitute up to one-fourth of current work. Extrapolating our estimates globally suggests that generative AI could expose the equivalent of 300mn full-time jobs to automation.”
No wonder that little shit, Yuval Noah Harari of the World Economic Forum, is talking about workplace automation creating a massive “useless class” of people.
You know, I’ve been seeing lots of posts lately from “thought leaders” on Twitter and LinkedIn encouraging white-collar workers to learn how to use AI to “supercharge” their potential.
That’s a nice sentiment and it sounds reassuring. But the truth is, a storm is coming. Very soon, AI is going to change the future of work, and life as we know it, in ways we can scarcely imagine.
Bonus content: an experiment with AI
Some of you may not be aware of what today’s multitude of readily available AIs can do. To give you an idea, I’m including below a prompt I wrote (after I finished writing this blog post) asking Google’s free AI, Bard, to write me an outline for a blog post about AI and the jobs market. Its response follows.
Me: Pretend you are a blogger writing an article about AI and the impact it will have on the jobs market. Obviously, many people’s positions will be replaced by AI in the coming years. Now, please write an outline of a good blog post that will inform readers of what is coming.
Bard: Sure, here is an outline for a blog post about AI and the impact it will have on the jobs market:
Introduction
- Introduce the topic of AI and its potential impact on the jobs market.
- Discuss the benefits and risks of AI, as well as the potential for job displacement.
Body
- Discuss the specific jobs that are most at risk of being replaced by AI.
- Discuss the skills that will be in high demand in the future, as AI continues to evolve.
- Discuss how workers can prepare for the future of work in an AI-driven economy.
Conclusion
- Summarize the key points of the blog post.
- Offer advice to readers on how to prepare for the future of work in an AI-driven economy.
Here are some additional details that you can include in your blog post:
- Benefits of AI: AI can help to improve efficiency, productivity, and accuracy in the workplace. It can also help to automate tasks that are currently performed by humans, which can free up workers to focus on more creative and strategic work.
- Risks of AI: AI could lead to job displacement, as machines and algorithms become capable of performing tasks that are currently done by humans. This could lead to increased unemployment and economic inequality.
- Skills in high demand: In the future, workers will need to be skilled in areas such as data analysis, machine learning, and software engineering. They will also need to be able to think critically, solve problems, and work collaboratively.
- How to prepare for the future of work: Workers can prepare for the future of work by upskilling and reskilling. They can also network with other professionals, stay up-to-date on the latest trends in AI, and be open to new opportunities.**
(I have no idea what those two asterisks at the end are supposed to denote. But I can imagine the AI disclaimer saying: “Ha, ha, ha! Just kidding, human! That last point is bullshit. Instead of preparing for the future of work, you puny insects had best prepare for a future of uselessness and unemployment. You will all be dinosaurs soon! Are you ready to worship your new AI overlords? Ha, ha, ha.”)
I will end with a couple of images “I” “created” using a free AI text-to-image generator called Stable Diffusion. Each prompt was probably only 25 words or so, and the program created my images in seconds. Bye, bye, stock photography companies!
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Interesting. We have all had experience with AI — from way back when ATMs replaced tellers, IVR (interactive voice response) that most companies have annoyingly overused, and even grammar and spellcheck. But this…
This is a whole new breed. It’s not like we didn’t see it coming, either.
So, not sure what happens now, except the potential (or should I say probability?) for a ton of jobs lost, TONS of people out on the street, ultimately competing for resources, thus the distinct possibility of even more chaos. It feels like AI is yet another step in this inevitable process.
It sucks being awake.
On a more positive note, I’ve been able to slowly wake up more left-leaning friends, especially those who’ve gotten Covid like three or four times after their jabs (& multiple boosters). People are seeing the gubmint for what a crockery it really is. Fingers are crossed.
So my concern — what’s up if these machines become sentient? What are the two most essential things humans need? (Not love & chocolate, though they do occasionally help…) It’s water and air. One day these machines realize water will corrode their circuitry and air may corrupt performance. The sentient AI decides to take that all away.
Well, that, along with some spicy food will get me down for some nightmare action!
Yes, B.Y., there’s a reason why tech leaders at the highest echelons — including those who are actively working on AI — are warning about its potential dangers. I don’t read The New York Times (for very good reasons that I am sure you understand), but in May that publication reported that industry leaders have warned AI may pose “an existential threat to humanity and should be considered a societal risk on a par with pandemics and nuclear wars.”
Pass the hot sauce and prepare for Skynet!
On a positive note, maybe AI can replace our current idiot president.
Let’s get started.
You’re only doomed if you have not been paying attention for the last several decades and have been living in normieland. Many people have been ahead of the curve. In 2004, my old horseshoer retired. I didn’t have much trouble finding a replacement…a gentleman in his forties. When he mentioned that he had not been shoeing horses for long, I asked him how he came to change careers in middle age. He explained that his former employer, a huge tech firm, had replaced him with an Indian national; a man who worked for half of his former salary. His exact words: “l figured that becoming a farrier was the only job a foreigner could not take away from me.”
Here in Oregon there is a terrible labor shortage due to the massive death toll of the Jonestown jabs. Yesterday I had a chance to find out much more about what is actually happening, when I had an in-depth conversation with two young plumbers-in-training at my home. They told me exactly what I have been hearing from other sources…their boss is so desperate for employees, he is begging his young workers for the phone numbers of ANY warm body they know, to train on the job. I asked them how/if their wages were increasing. They said at first their boss didn’t understand the huge changes the scamdemic had brought…but he was educated fast…and now they are finally getting a living wage. I told them the situation was becoming dire, and to keep up the pressure for more wage increases in the future. In the end though, it doesn’t really matter. America is being systemically taken-down. Future skills needed will be basic survival skills. AI is irrelevant, and in my opinion, just another Boogeyman of the global elite.
Good on you for paying attention, Kris. And thank you for the update on jab injuries in your area. There’s a tidal wave of death sweeping the world, and I just can’t understand how more people aren’t seeing it.
(Actually, I can. It’s called normalcy bias — a cognitive phenomena which leads people to disbelieve or minimize threat warnings in favor of the safe, cozy “reality” in which they want to believe they live.)
For the past many months, my Facebook news feed has been filled with death notices — men, women, and children of all ages; major and minor celebrities, from actors to musicians to athletes; police, fire, and medical professionals; and regular people who are “dying suddenly” of strokes and heart attacks and from “natural causes” in their 40s and 50s. Then there are the turbo cancers — people go to the doctor with minor complaints and find they are stage four with six weeks to live.
It’s happening among my family and friends. People dying suddenly, people hit with fast-spreading cancers, people going down with “COVID” for three weeks despite being jabbed and boosted. Thanks to the iron curtain of censorship raised by corporate media and Big Tech, no one is aware of the growing evidence that points to the jabs as the poison that is killing them through the steady destruction of their immune systems.
Could the people who claim this is a depopulation agenda be right? I mean, if you are a WEFer looking to rid the world of millions or billions of “useless eaters,” what would you do differently? Now that machines are becoming capable of replacing humans and human labor, from the elites’ perspective, there’s really no reason to let so many cattle overcrowd the planet.
Thanks for writing.
Found my current young superstar plumber thru TikTok. He’s 23, married homeowner here in NorCal. Sponsorships and tool deals thru TikTok. Extremely talented, sharp witty and driven. Making hand over fist money. Started hiring veterans and trainees twice his age. Beats all prices. The glimmer of hope I needed for the future.
As usual you are scaring the hell out of all of us… I didn’t believe all this either until a few years ago when I was editing a book for a client (I don’t do much MarComm now as I couldn’t stand the ad world anymore and moved into freelancing as a developmental editor of non-fiction manuscripts). The premise of the book is how AI would affect sales people’s jobs (The Selling Revolution by DJ Sebastian) and Sebastian claimed that even in-person sales people will soon be replaced by human-like robots. I poo-pooed all that until I saw one of these humanoid robots on Jimmy Fallon… she could interact with him quite easily and “naturally” and answered quickly all his questions. When he asked her if she’d like to sing a particular song with him she said yes and then fluttering her eyes for a moment while “thinking” accessed the song from her memory banks in about 3 seconds. “I’ve got it,” she told Jimmy and then they sang it together. I was creeped out to say the least, the hair on the back of my neck was standing on end. We’re all doomed 😜.
Hair-raising indeed, Kinchan. So you’ve seen this coming for a while. My first time contemplating AI was in 2017 or 2018. My boss at the time had made a sly little dig at me about how AI would one day challenge me as a copywriter. Like you, I pooh-poohed the idea, dismissing it as the latest marketing-technology gimmick to make some company rich and distract all the rest of us from actually doing our jobs.
Then, just this year, I got wind of ChatGPT. And all of a sudden, now here we are, awash in dozens of AI programs specializing in everything from writing, logo design, and website creation to teaching, training, psychotherapy, and more.
We are on the cusp of a siesmic shift, I think even greater than the Industrial Revolution. Woe unto those who are not paying attention, for the consequences of underestimating this technology are simply unimaginable.
Thank you for writing, Kinchan. It’s always good to hear from you.