Many of these occupations have been described as being vulnerable to AI: accountants, customer support specialists, financial advisors, HR professionals, IT support specialists, journalists, legal professionals, marketing professionals, office clerks, software developers, and teachers.
Non creative jobs that don’t make anything new and just follow set decision paths and templates. Okay, that makes sense.
The problem isn’t that workers are avoiding generative AI chatbots - quite the contrary. But they simply aren’t yet equating to actual economic benefits.
Meaning, an accontant forgot the specifics of a particular way to account for a transaction and instead of using Google.com to look for an answer… or an accountant specific reference manual… or a senior coworker… or call a government tax office… they direct their question to an AI chatbot. The AI chatbot being the most expensive (for the moment) and least reliable means of answering the question.
The economists found for example that “AI chatbots have created new job tasks for 8.4 percent of workers, including some who do not use the tools themselves.”
In other words, AI is creating new work that cancels out some potential time savings from using AI in the first place.
So an accountant needs some clarfication about some accounting thing, uses the AI chatbot to get “an” answer, then needs to… use Google.com … or an accountant specific reference manual… or a senior coworker… or call a government tax office… to verify that the AI chatbot’s answer is complete and correct.
“These new job tasks create new demand for workers, which may boost their wages, if these are more high value added tasks,” he said.
“You would get paid more money to use the spell checker at work”, said no employer, ever.
On the other hand, I don’t think a job being “non-creative” should be considered derogatory. The wheels of society are greased by bureaucrats and sanitation staff, and the total human suffering averted by a person sanitizing doorknobs or what have you is significantly greater than whatever it is that programmers and mechanical engineers are doing all day (mostly bombs and the panopticon).
Non creative jobs that don’t make anything new and just follow set decision paths and templates. Okay, that makes sense.
Meaning, an accontant forgot the specifics of a particular way to account for a transaction and instead of using Google.com to look for an answer… or an accountant specific reference manual… or a senior coworker… or call a government tax office… they direct their question to an AI chatbot. The AI chatbot being the most expensive (for the moment) and least reliable means of answering the question.
So an accountant needs some clarfication about some accounting thing, uses the AI chatbot to get “an” answer, then needs to… use Google.com … or an accountant specific reference manual… or a senior coworker… or call a government tax office… to verify that the AI chatbot’s answer is complete and correct.
“You would get paid more money to use the spell checker at work”, said no employer, ever.
wages and productivity, stats that are famously still correlated with each other
This is meant as a joke, right?
Not meant to be a joke but also, on reflection, “non-creative jobs” is a really shitty way to describe those jobs.
On the other hand, I don’t think a job being “non-creative” should be considered derogatory. The wheels of society are greased by bureaucrats and sanitation staff, and the total human suffering averted by a person sanitizing doorknobs or what have you is significantly greater than whatever it is that programmers and mechanical engineers are doing all day (mostly bombs and the panopticon).