Is a Robot Gonna Steal My Job?

A discussion of the role AI will have in our working future

BY ANDREW PALIK

Did you know that the company Nutella employed an algorithm to design 7 million labels for a marketing campaign? The startling result: it sold out in a month.

Before you start to sweat, Marketing and Strategic Com majors, this example is not common in the business world. Yet, in the next decade it is probable that AI will affect the job market fundamentally.

How AI will affect our future careers is a coin flip. On one side, AI has the capacity to replace us in many jobs and on the other AI could become our new tool at work. Both sides of the coin have implications that we must learn to live with.

To start off, we can predict that AI is going to replace many jobs. AI performs routine and monotonous tasks in short amounts of time. This entails replacing occupations that write code, do administrative tasks, and provide customer service. For example, IBM has begun replacing positions that don’t involve customer interaction.

“AI might automate routine jobs”, you might be thinking, “but surely they can’t replace human creativity”. You would be wrong. Generative AI can create text, images, video and audio in a quality comparable to a person.

Hypothetically, creative work that was previously done by a skilled team, can now be done by one person. If someone knows how to type the right prompts, presumably they can produce quality articles, videos, and art. Competition in these creative fields would increase, and availability of jobs might decrease significantly. AI’s ability to produce profitable results, like with Nutella, suggests that companies will adopt AI. Companies choose the option that creates the most amount of profit and the least cost. AI doesn’t ask for things like “benefits” or “sick days”. A company will choose poorer quality work made by AI over more creative work by humans to save cash.

In the past, 3.5 million jobs were replaced after the invention of computers. History seems ready to repeat itself as the World Economic Forum predicts that AI will replace 85 million jobs in the next decade. The WEF also predicts that AI will create 97 million new jobs. Jobs like prompt engineering, AI reviewing, and AI coding could be in high demand. Possibly, AI will not replace us, but rather become a helpful tool. While automation takes monotonous tasks, workers are freed to improve in other areas. For example, in scientific research AI can sift through data, detecting outcomes and patterns that humans can’t spot. Researchers can expedite their process and conduct more studies and research. Any business can use AI chatbots to organize databases and analyst positions can use Chat GPT to sort through the data. Creative fields can also utilize AI to help their creative process. It’s important to remember that computers and adobe didn’t kill artists’ creativity, but helped the design industry grow. AI can help artists experiment with new techniques and create novel types of art. AI can also undertake the repetitive tasks that artists or video creators use to spend hours completing. AI also has large potential for assisting writers. This article your reading is an example. I used Chat GPT for material, brainstorming ideas, information, and spell checks. I could copy and paste this article into Chat GPT and have it edit, add words, or even stylize it in a different way. Writers can complete assignments more quickly, and do more projects or improve their content. In theory, better quality work would then equal better opportunities. I might venture to say that AI will help us gain more access to jobs. AI would be our new co-worker, not our replacement. Overall, AI’s future is like an opaque wall. We see the other side but it is not clear. It is Uncertain. Uncertainty is the reason why this topic can simultaneously create anxiety and hope. A good example is the Nutella case. It is scary that an AI created products that were successful. But AI only created the individual label designs. Perhaps there is more hope that as AI takes on specifics, people can focus on the bigger picture.