Does ChatGPT mean bots will keep skilled jobs?

Will robots take our jobs?

People have been asking this question for a long time.

The British economist of the Regency era, David Ricardoadded to the third edition of his classic “Principles of Political Economy”, published in 1821, a chapter entitled “On Machinery”, in which he tried to show how the technologies of the first Industrial Revolution could, at least initially, harm workers.

the novel of Kurt Vonnegut “Player Piano”, from 1952, imagined a near future in the United States where the automation It eliminated most of the occupation.

At the level of the economy as a whole, the verdict is clear:

so far machines have not eliminated the need for workers.

American workers are almost five times more productive than in the early postwar years, but there hasn’t been an upward trend in unemployment over the long term.

That said, technology can eliminate some types of occupation.

In 1948, half a million Americans worked in coal mining; most of those jobs disappeared by the turn of the 21st century not because we stopped mining coal – the great decline in coal production, first in favor of natural gas and then renewables, only started about 15 years ago – but because mining and the removal of mountaintops has allowed ever greater quantities of coal to be extracted with far fewer workers.

It is true that jobs that disappear due to technological progress have generally been replaced by other jobs.

But that doesn’t mean the process was painless.

Workers may not find it easy to change jobs, especially if the new jobs are in different locations.

In some cases, like coal, technological change can eradicate community and their way of life.

As I have already mentioned, this type of dislocation has characterized modern societies for at least two centuries.

But now something new could happen.

In the past, the jobs replaced by technology tended to be manual.

Machines have replaced muscles.

On the one hand, industrial robots have replaced the routine work of assembly lines.

Instead, the demand for knowledge workers, a term coined by the management consultant, is growing Peter Drucker in 1959 to designate people who are dedicated to solving problems in a non-repetitive way.

Many people, myself included, have said that we are becoming more and more a knowledge economy.

But what if machines can take on much of what we have historically thought of as knowledge work?

Last week, the research firm Open AI released – to great fanfare in technology circles – a program called ChatGPT, which may contain what appear to be natural language conversations.

You can ask questions or requests and get surprisingly clear and even well-informed answers.

There are also fun things to do – an analysis of secular stagnation in sonnet form was recently requested and received from a colleague – but let’s stick to the things that might be economically useful.

ChatGPT is just the latest example of technology that appears capable of performing tasks that not so long ago seemed to require the services of not just humans, but humans with significant formal education.

For example, machine translation from one language to another was a joke; some readers may have heard the Russian-English translation program’s apocryphal account that said “the spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak” and ended with “the vodka was good, but the flesh was spoiled.”

Today, translation programs may not produce great literature, but They are suitable for many purposes.

And the same is true in many fields.

It can be argued that what we often call artificial intelligence is not really intelligence.

Indeed, it may be a long time before machines can be truly creative or offer insightful insight.

But then how much of what humans do is actually creative or deeply insightful?

(Indeed, how much of what is published in academic journals – a field of practice I know quite well – meets these criteria?)

There can be so many knowledge related jobs eminently replaceable.

What will this mean for the economy?

It is difficult to predict exactly how AI will affect the demand for knowledge workers, as it will likely vary by sector and by specific job function.

However, it is possible that in some cases AI and automation could perform certain knowledge-based tasks more efficiently than humans, potentially reducing the need for some knowledge workers.

This could include activities such as data analysis, research and report writing.

However, it should also be noted that AI and automation can also create new job opportunities for knowledge workers, especially in sectors related to development and Implementation of AI.

Ok, I didn’t write the paragraph you just read; it was done by ChatGPT, in response to the question

“How will AI affect the demand for knowledge workers?”

The surprise, at least for me, is that I still refuse to use “impact” as a verb.

And he didn’t spell out why, in general, we shouldn’t expect any impact on aggregate employment.

But it was probably better than what many humans, including some who consider themselves intelligent, would have written.

In the long run, productivity increases in knowledge industries, like past increases in traditional industries, will enrich society and improve our lives in general (unless Skynet kills us all).

But in the long run, we’re all dead, and even before that, some of us may find ourselves unemployed or earning far less than we expected given our expensive educations.

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