TECH - JOBS PROGRESS - TEMP : MASTER GLOBAL ESSAY

 

! WARNING ! : '' Almost every job '', ....... I repeat, almost every job is exposed to automation by Artificial Intelligence. I painstakingly browse through research. Sources : Capital Economics academic papers.

SO WHAT DOES AI mean for your pay? So here is a dispatch from the front line of the economic revolution.

AROUND a decade ago Carl Benesikt Frey and Michael Osborne, two economists published a paper that went viral.

It argues that 47% of American jobs were at risk of automation. A deluge of research followed, which suggested the poorest and least-educated workers were most vulnerable to the coming revolution.

Such fears have intensified as artificial-intelligence [AI] capabilities have leapt ahead. On November 2nd, speaking after Britain's AI summit, Elon Musk predicted : '' THERE WILL COME A POINT WHERE NO JOB IS NEEDED.''

Yet at the same time, economists have become more optimistic. Recent studies have found that fewer workers are exposed to automation than Messrs Frey and Osborne supposed.

In 2019 Michael Webb, then of Stanford University, showed that AI patents are more targeted at skilled jobs than those for software and robots.

New AI seems better at coding and creativity than anything in the physical world, suggesting that low -skilled jobs may be insulated.

In March Shakked Noy and Whitney Zhang, both of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT], published an experiment showing that ChatGPT boosted the productivity when writing of lower-ability workers more than that of higher-ability workers.

Although AI is still in its infancy, some industries have been eager adopters. A close look at three of these - translation, customer service and sales - is broadly supportive of the optimistic shift among economists though not without complications.

In translation, perhaps the first industry to be heavily affected by language modelling, workers have become copy editors, tidying a first draft undertaken by AI, which eases the path of newbies into the industry.

In customer service, AI has helped raise the performance of stragglers.

But in sales, top performers use the tech to find leads and take notes, pulling away from their peers.

Will AI boost the incomes of superstars more than those of stragglers, much as the internet revolution did?

Or will it be a ''great equaliser'', raising the incomes of the worst off but not those of  high flyers? The answer may depend on the type of employment in question.

The '' Jobmageddon '' continues. Almost every job is exposed to Automation by AI.

The Publishing of this Master Essay continues in the future. The World Students Society thanks The Economist.