Artificial Intelligence is a set of technologies that perform simple and advanced tasks that require huge data crunching for speed and accuracy. Many AI platforms analyze data, predict various decisions, automate tasks, and translate languages. While AI is in its early stages, millions of people already use programs like ChatGPT and OpenAI. Much of AI’s use in the public domain is around text and image and video creation. Some platforms offer free access, others require a monthly or annual fee.
AI is not inherently good or bad. It is a tool that can be used for good or bad. AI use in the workplace, however, has people fearful that it may mean a loss of jobs. Those fears are not entirely misplaced. Many companies are starting to use AI to perform repetitive and simple tasks, displacing workers, especially at the lower level. The tech world has seen perhaps the most job losses, but other industries are beginning to lay off workers and replace them with AI technologies. AI is displacing jobs in automation, programming, customer service, administrative tasks, data entry, analysis, translation, manufacturing, and retail. The companies see their use of AI as a means of cutting costs and bringing efficiencies to their products or services. The way they see it, machines don’t need to eat, sleep, or pay bills.
These job losses are having a disastrous effect in the workplace, among employees, and in economies around the world. AI’s use is changing work environments as offices are emptied of staff and managers. Those employees who remain suffer from low morale because they have no idea how long they will continue to have jobs. The uncertainty is affecting their productivity and creativity.
What can we do to combat this? Sadly, very little, except finding creative ways to adapt and keep ourselves useful in our place of employment. Certainly, some employees can upskill and demand retraining for those new jobs AI will likely create. Smart workers are already doing this while others are pushing the politicians to regulate the new technologies in ways that will avoid massive job loss. Some are even calling for governments to institute worker compensation for those who lose jobs to AI.
The stickiest questions around AI, however, are those based on moral issues. How do we keep AI acting solely as a force for good? How do we make sure AI does not harm humans? What can we do to make sure the robots don’t replace us? There aren’t obvious or easy answers to these questions. We can only make every effort to maintain control of this world-changing technology so that it works on behalf of human beings at all times.