By: Terri Lewis
IS AI COMING FOR YOUR JOB?
If that concerns you, ask yourself: can you do without it? Do you scan Facebook or Instagram postings, use Google for a recipe, or ask Siri to make a phone call while driving? These are all AI‑driven tools that help make life easier. Do you pay bills online? How about email? AI impacts our daily lives and is pervasive in our culture.
SO IS AI COMING FOR YOUR JOB?
This isn’t a dumb question. Since the tech industry isn’t great at explaining itself, let’s start with some definitions.
What exactly is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
A straightforward definition is “machines acting intelligently.” If you think about it, a traffic signal is acting intelligently—signaling to people when it is safe to cross an intersection. It has replaced traffic officers and crossing guards at almost all intersections. Today, no one would debate that this adoption of AI wasn’t beneficial. Those traffic officers moved into other jobs, but sometimes they’re called back when signals fail or traffic overwhelms them.
AI is pervasive in our world, and sometimes it needs help from humans to work better. Technically, AI combines math, computer capabilities, and data. A computer’s math models are fed data, and those models generate an output.
What has changed recently?
While there have been gains in computer power, the most significant change has been the explosion in the amount of available data: electronic books, health records, social media, etc. Every 60 seconds, over 12 million social media updates, almost 175 million emails sent, and 1,820 terabytes of data are created.
Types of AI “intelligence”
- Specific Intelligence means an AI application is knowledgeable about a single task—like the traffic signal or a chess‑playing program. Each is successful only at that particular task. A traffic light can’t play chess, and a chess program can’t control an intersection.
- General Intelligence is the ability to use intelligence across many different areas, learning from one and applying it to another. It involves reasoning, adaptive learning, emotions, and values. This is where the human mind is far more advanced than machines. While a human may lose at chess to a machine, that same human can direct traffic and play chess.
Generative AI
There are many types of AI, but the recent news buzz surrounds generative AI. Generative AI takes word prompts and generates new data or images. Two headline‑grabbing programs are ChatGPT and DALL‑E. ChatGPT generates text; DALL‑E takes words and creates images. Applications range across art, journalism, law, marketing, gaming, fashion, medical records, and more.
Caveat: Don’t expect generative AI to be fully accurate or fail‑proof. AI technology is surprisingly terrible at catching, labeling, and removing lousy content. AI can’t reason, has no emotions, and doesn’t know right from wrong. Successful use of generative AI requires a human to remedy errors.
Impact on jobs
Generative AI will change many jobs, but primarily as a tool to help humans work better. As people become more productive with generative AI, there may be fewer jobs in specific fields—but history shows that with each technological advance, jobs and required skills shift rather than disappear overall.
Bottom line: AI won’t take your job, but there’s a risk that someone using AI will.
