AI Unlikely To Destroy Most Jobs, But Clerical Workers at Risk, UN Study Says (reuters.com) 55
Generative AI probably will not take over most people's jobs entirely but will instead automate a portion of their duties, freeing them up to do other tasks, a U.N. study said on Monday. From a report: It warned, however, that clerical work would likely be the hardest hit, potentially hitting female employment harder, given women's over-representation in this sector, especially in wealthier countries. An explosion of interest in generative AI and its chatbot applications has sparked fears over job destruction, similar to those that emerged when the moving assembly line was introduced in the early 1900s and after mainframe computers in the 1950s.
However, the study produced by the International Labour Organization concludes that: "Most jobs and industries are only partially exposed to automation and are thus more likely to be complemented rather than substituted by AI." This means that "the most important impact of the technology is likely to be of augmenting work," it adds. The occupation likely to be most affected by GenAI -- capable of generating text, images, sounds, animation, 3D models and other data -- is clerical work, where about a quarter of tasks are highly exposed to potential automation, the study says.
However, the study produced by the International Labour Organization concludes that: "Most jobs and industries are only partially exposed to automation and are thus more likely to be complemented rather than substituted by AI." This means that "the most important impact of the technology is likely to be of augmenting work," it adds. The occupation likely to be most affected by GenAI -- capable of generating text, images, sounds, animation, 3D models and other data -- is clerical work, where about a quarter of tasks are highly exposed to potential automation, the study says.
Collating (Score:3)
Re:Collating (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not really that different than any other labor-saving technology, from the wind mill to the power loom to the steam engine. There will be some job losses simply because the new technology requires less bodies to make it work, but as you say, you will still need someone to manage the process, perform quality control on the output. So perhaps in an office with five clerical staff, it might get winnowed down to two, and obviously that is going to have significant impacts.
The march of technology will always lead to displacement and changing roles. It's the nature of advancement. In the past, such as during the Industrial Revolution, there was a period of unmanaged displacement, leading to much higher unemployment rates, cities flooding with people leaving the countryside because agriculture itself was being revolutionized, needing far fewer farmhands. Housing prices skyrocketed, slums grew, and along with it poverty, disease and addiction. But we know a lot more than we did two hundred years ago about the impacts, so really the job of government and society as a whole is to find a way to manage the decline in certain occupations, and not to do what our forebears always did, just shrug, shoot bullets at the mob and let a new status quo evolve in a chaotic and often violent manner.
Re:Collating (Score:5, Interesting)
Factory automation has ultimately led to factories with a lot less workers. It's why the great outcry to repatriate manufacturing jobs (which I agree with, mostly) was never going to lead to a whole bunch of rehired blue collar workers.
Historically the remedy has been that a new disruptive technology may empty the pews, so to speak, of an industry, but shuffle workers to another one. The problem is that as the pace of advancement increases there's no lag time between disruptive technology A and disruptive technology B. In the case of AI, if it does pan out, it is absolutely going to reduce the number of clerical positions, but it's not really obvious where those people go. At the moment we're at a pivot point, where most developed economies are still based on an absolute growth model, but it still means workers often have to be retrained to move into another industry.
In the long run, things will balance out. It will have to, because by the end of the century global population growth is going to stall, and then it's likely it will begin a decline. Industries that require a lot of people are going to get squeezed. Indeed, it's happening already in the service industry. Hotels, restaurants, and related industries are having a hard time finding workers, the problem there is that automation is some way off from filling the gap. I'm watching businesses fold in my community, not for a lack of sales, but for a lack of staff. But it's going to be a helluva an adjustment for someone working in the AP department whose job becomes redundant because two people with an AI can do the same amount of work as a department of ten people, to now be changing sheets in a hotel.
As I said, we have been here before, with the mass movement of people off the farms during the Industrial Revolution. Suddenly you have guys who were plowing fields, bailing hay and managing livestock showing up in the big city to work in a factory. It was really ugly and created a lot of trouble that did ultimately resolve itself, but not without a considerable amount of blood (metaphorical and real) on the floor. Hopefully we can look back at such disruptive periods and try to manage the transition, rather than just let the chips fall where they may.
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Hotels, restaurants, and related industries are having a hard time finding workers, the problem there is that automation is some way off from filling the gap. I'm watching businesses fold in my community, not for a lack of sales, but for a lack of staff. But it's going to be a helluva an adjustment for someone working in the AP department whose job becomes redundant because two people with an AI can do the same amount of work as a department of ten people, to now be changing sheets in a hotel.
The adjustment will be tough for consumers as well as the employees. Many/most industries which relied on low-cost labor will eventually come to terms with the increased cost of labor required to fill positions. This will require consumers to come to grips with increased prices in those industries. Food costs, especially at restaurants, and travel costs are likely to increase significantly. It is likely we could see a drop in eating out and travel because of this. Or automation could make other industries c
Though for all matters--not a machine that patters (Score:2)
Key being oversight. It's been said but bears repeating. We can't just let the computer decide as if we had every base c
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Translation (Score:3)
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AI isn't doing the heavy lifting though. AI is a lightweight and incompetent. The difference is that AI is the boss's son and thus gets a job whether qualified or not.
"Ms Jones-bot, take a memo."
"Already done, sir and/or madam."
"But I haven't told you what to write yet!"
"It doesn't matter, sir and/or madam."
"Never mind, I'll write it myself."
"I'm sorry, sir and/or madam, I have already written and posted the memo. Stock prices are plummeting as we speak."
"Damm, could you please write a resume for me."
"Al
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Maybe the real purpose of replacing some jobs with AI is because you can *finally* have an excuse to lay off the incompetent idiot. Too often I find that incompetents continue on with the job far longer than they should, because laying off someone is difficult. At least difficult if you're the bottom level manager. Sometimes there's a hiring freeze so you can't hire a replacement for the idiot, or it's been difficult finding replacements for other reasons.
(Had one guy in the 80s who wanted to be fired, a
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I doubt there's any jobs at risk (Score:2, Informative)
Chatbots are so gimmicky and unreliable. It's all money down the toilet, just like NFTs.
Re:I doubt there's any jobs at risk (Score:4, Funny)
I want a chatbot to talk to the chatbot's that are supposed to be customer service. It'll be Thunderdome style. Two bots go in. One comes out.
In the meantime, nothing of value will be lost.
The trouble is AI will destroy good paying jobs (Score:1)
This will have knock on effects. A million office workers lose their jobs. That money is just gone. It no longer exists in the economy. Companies don't hire because they have more profits, they hire to meet demand. Less people with jobs means less demand. Especially at the lower end (e.g. working class office workers). Companies will increasingly focus on luxury and high end products, like how Apple computer is the most
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A million office workers lose their jobs.
That's not very likely. It's much more likely that AI generates the need for an additional million office workers to fix the astounding amount of stupid generated by the likes of ChatGPT. More likely than that is the defects of it and its brethren will be so bad, we once again relegate it to endeavors where accuracy is not terribly important, and life moves on with the status quo.
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Well, yes, but don't be too optimistic. What you're seeing now is the current wave of AI, which will need to fix it's hallucination problem to reach completion, but there are other waves currently in process, but which just haven't yet been as successful. Consider a Chatbot melded into an effective self driving vehicle (I'm thinking something smaller than a St. Bernard, and slower) with a couple of effective eyes, a couple of ears, and a couple of arms with decent hands at the end of the arms. It wouldn'
What if all this talk of AI (Score:2)
This can and will get them salivating over the prospect of automation.
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You make it sound like it's a problem that can be fixed.
Here's the thing: so-called 'hallucinations' aren't errors or mistakes, they're exactly the kind of output you should expect from models of this type. They don't operate on facts and concepts like people seem to think they do. They operate exclusively on relationships between tokens.
You wouldn't expect an n-gram model to ever be able to guarantee the correctness of its output and they're not all that different from transforms in the sense that they ge
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IIUC, hallucinations are caused because the LLMs aren't grounded. Give them a body, and limit the tasks to those the body can get feedback on, and the problem should go away. It will make the initial training a bit more difficult, of course. You can't depend on the web. So the LLM would be limited in what it could talk about to simplify training. You still train on the web, but only a little bit, then you give it specialized training appropriate to it's body, and the stuff from the web has it's weights
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IIUC, hallucinations are caused because the LLMs aren't grounded.
You do not. In fact, none of what you've written here makes any sense at all. I'm not sure exactly where you've gone wrong, but you seem to be under the impression that LLMs are like living things that learn and grow on their own with time and experience. Nothing could be farther from reality.
A transformer, fancy as it is, can be conceptually reduced to a lookup table, with the exception of the very last step where an output token is selected probabilistically from the output vector. Tokens are produced
Re: The trouble is AI will destroy good paying job (Score:2)
Is the sky ever not falling in that cavernous head of yours?
No (Score:3)
Automation is a real problem [businessinsider.com]. So is climate change. So is the increase of autocratic governments and authoritarian impulses in developed democracies.
We can solve the these problems, but first we
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Nasty, brutish, and short? Seems like you're misusing a quote from Hobbes. He was describing the natural state of Man, not modern life.
Re: No (Score:2)
That article you linked is really bad. Right from the start, you see this:
Wage growth has been stagnant for the better part of five decades. What's been powering the stagnation is still debated.
It's really odd they call it stagnant when we've been seeing real wage growth (meaning, adjusted for inflation) that never did stop. And the time span they chose is really telling -- the wage growth we saw in the postwar period was an anomaly resulting from the reconstruction of global infrastructure that the US primarily benefitted from, because unlike the rest of the world at the time, we went relatively unscathed where nearly all o
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Not even close. This kind of fear mongering about "technology is going to take all jobs" has been debunked since 1811 you Luddite...
Technology ALWAYS ends up creating more jobs. The jobs just shift. That’s it. That’s all. And it has been proven over and over and over and over again. Clever people will figure out ways to make AI useful in a new fashion that will spawn job growth. You just can’t see it yet. But it will happen.
Short sighted and hysterical personalities like yourself t
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No matter how much people want it, UBI is not going to happen. All that it will do is just get inflation going up, just like minimum wage hikes did, where inflation hit record levels after the min wage hikes happened these past few years.
Giveaways sound nice, but they are unsustainable, and there is no way to fund them.
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Wages don't drive inflation. There is no evidence to support that.
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Technology ALWAYS ends up creating more jobs. The jobs just shift. That’s it. That’s all. And it has been proven over and over and over and over again.
I don't agree with the GP, but your statement is just as ridiculous if not more so. Past performance does not guarantee future results. It is perfectly reasonable to be optimistic about future job growth brought on by technology like AI, but claiming it is guaranteed is preposterous. We have already seen an example of a species that remained a staple in the workforce for 6000 years see its value in the economy drop significantly once it's role was almost entirely removed by technology. There was a 75% reduc
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Past performance doesn't guarantee future results....but it is BY FAR the best indicator of what will happen at the macro scale. I didn't predict which jobs would be created and I never said that jobs such as your horse example wouldn't go away. I said the opposite. Today's horse driver will be tomorrow auto mechanic or Uber driver or whatever. But there will be more of them than AI will displace. And if you think that the manufacturing jobs of the 1970s vanished into thin air, you are looking in the
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The jobs lost are buggy-whip maker jobs. Life goes on, and those people can retrain to do something useful. The idea of a "middle class" was a post-WWII fantasy that could exist for a few decades because the US was the sole place in the world making stuff and not reduced to rubble by a world war. In the real world, that stuff doesn't exist.
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and also the kind of jobs you can do for 12+ hours a day without breaking your body.
I'm not sure what's harder on your body. Sitting in a cubicle (or home office) 8 hours a day or swinging a hammer and carrying around building supplies for 8 hours a day.
We evolved to do a lot of low grade manual labour, I'm not sure the "best" jobs are really best for us.
This will have knock on effects. A million office workers lose their jobs. That money is just gone. It no longer exists in the economy. Companies don't hire because they have more profits, they hire to meet demand. Less people with jobs means less demand. Especially at the lower end (e.g. working class office workers). Companies will increasingly focus on luxury and high end products, like how Apple computer is the most profitable company in history selling high end computers. The middle will get completely hollowed out.
I don't think this will improve income distribution (esp in the short term) but it's an extremely tight labour market. I doubt there will be a big jump in the unemployment rate.
We're heading to a world were work is in short supply, and where we can't use "make work" anymore to keep up the façade. We're either going to stop moving all the wealth to the top or we're going back to a feudal system of King & Queens, with nearly all of us peasants.
Elon Musk will have built a self driving car long before AI st
Cutting jobs (Score:2)
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Of course they will, because if the job is made easier, workers can either do more, or a lower-trained, cheaper worker can do the same job as a higher-paid worker.
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And that's the part these reports seem to leave out. They answer the question of "No, your office of 100 workers won't be replaced by one computer," yet say nothing of, "Yep, your office of 100 workers will be optimized to be an office of 80 workers and one computer."
Clerical workers still exist? (Score:3)
I used to do a lot of temp jobs back in the early 90s. A common task was taking paper forms filled out by sales associates, and entering them in to the database. It was pretty obvious these companies would eventually go electronic and train their staff to do the entry themselves while talking with the customer. Then later it became obvious the customer would do it online. A few places like the DMV and doctor's offices seem stuck in the past when it comes to this (Really? I have to write my name in blue ink AGAIN???), but pretty much everything else has moved on.
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A common task was taking paper forms filled out by sales associates, and entering them in to the database. It was pretty obvious these companies would eventually go electronic and train their staff to do the entry themselves while talking with the customer.
Crap, I had a temp job like that in the 90s, except that it was entering data from a mainframe into a Windows 95 application. Two hours in, I asked for a Win 3.11 CD from IT, used Recorder (which recorded both keystrokes and mouse actions) to automate the whole process, asked for three days' pay (I figured it would take me four mind-numbing days to do manually, vs about 36 hours of continuous operation of the macro), and got offered a job on the spot. Sorry, starting medical school in three weeks.
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It was actually still the early 2000s when I did what might have been my last temp job like that--entering the data from postcards that were sent in from a national "ways to prevent your teen from smoking and/or to quit smoking yourself" campaign--IIRC, part of a settlement with the tobacco companies that required them to sponsor it.
There were problems with kids filling out the cards as a joke (easy to spot) but also other problems validating the data that were quite easy to fix, to the point where I offere
I use it for tedium (Score:4, Insightful)
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AI will come for your job, but not like you think (Score:1)
I was one of roughly 30 middle-aged IT workers that were laid off from my institution. We were allegedly let go because of "budget issues" at the end of the fiscal year, but exactly a month later, a LinkedIn post by the same CTO was bragging about a new AI research arm with 15 new positions were available for AI experts - "with more to come".
It was a budget reallocation issue. I made the classic mistake of becoming comfortable with being no longer indispensable (I trained others to do what I could do - "c
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In other words, even if AI isn't going to replace your exact list of job responsibilities, it can easily come for your job.
And if greedy executives and business owners want to prematurely assume that AI is already capable enough to start reallocating humans out of the business, fine. AI can come for their product quality, their business, and ultimately their reputation. Good luck with that.
Although I wouldn't expect that CTO to lose their job, I'd be curious as to exactly what has come out of an AI "research arm" since inception, other than a marketing money sink.
More of same (Score:2)
Remember when offices had rows upon rows of desks manned by secretaries at typewriters doing the company's paperwork?
You probably don't, but your parents do, or your grandparents do.
Just like they had entire office buildings full of people calculating logarithms by hand to publish reference books with logarithm tables. You may need to go back to your great-grandparents for that.
Re: More of same (Score:2)
Clerical work? (Score:3)
Time to switch classes to Druid or Monk.
Enough euphemisms! (Score:2)