Advertisement

News

Is AI a Job Killer? Study Finds 80% of Jobs at Risk, but with Nuances

The future: An AI-dominated wasteland or a place full of opportunities?

Is AI a Job Killer? Study Finds 80% of Jobs at Risk, but with Nuances
Randy Meeks

Randy Meeks

  • Updated:

Overnight, in 2023 it seems like we’ve woken up straight into the future. Artificial Intelligence has turned everything so upside down that it is difficult to even imagine the job landscape in a few years. If AI eats people’s jobs, what will happen to those unemployed positions? Will it be a benefit for ordinary people or for businessmen? Although we all intuit the answer to this question, let’s see what conclusions Ethan Mollick, a Wharton College professor who has realized AI saves time and money, has come to.

It’s a drag to work

Mollick’s experiment was simple: he needed a marketing plan to kick off Wharton Interactive’s Saturn Parable, a grandiloquent name that hides a simulation to learn how to be a group leader. What would take days to do with a lot of people around him giving their opinions, was completed in just half an hour using Bing, ChatGPT4, MidJourney, ElevenLabs and D-iD on his own.

ChatGPT ACCESS

With these tools and a little ingenuity, Mollick created a marketing plan: branding, website, promotional video and even social media posts. At the very least, the professor is sure that a human team could have done better… But not so fast. Supply and demand. Are we doomed to a future of mediocre websites and marketing campaigns… Or maybe this is the beginning before AI learns what creativity is?

But the most interesting part of the experiment is posed in its conclusion: “When we can all do superhuman amounts of work, what happens? Do we do less work and have more leisure? Do we work more and do the work of ten people? Do employers benefit? Workers? I’m not sure”. Listen: anyone who says they have a magic recipe or that they know exactly what is going to happen in a few years is lying.

AI may change the world, it may stay the same. It certainly has the potential to lose 80% of jobs. It may do so and the world goes into global crisis, or it may gain millions of other jobs and we live better. There may be many who don’t even need to lift a finger to earn money. Hopefully, as Mollick points out in his conclusions, “we will live in a future where we do less of the boring work to focus on the more creative work we enjoy doing.”

The future of sci-fi movies is now. All that remains to be seen is whether we like living in it.

Randy Meeks

Randy Meeks

Editor specializing in pop culture who writes for websites, magazines, books, social networks, scripts, notebooks and napkins if there are no other places to write for you.

Latest from Randy Meeks

Editorial Guidelines