THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE SLOW TSUNAMI

(Written by ChatGPTAs artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly advances, it's causing concern for new college graduates entering the world of labor. According to a recent study by the World Economic Forum, the adoption of AI is expected to displace nearly 85 million jobs worldwide by 2025, while creating around 97 million new jobs. This shift is already taking place in industries such as finance, healthcare, and journalism, and is likely to continue across a wide range of sectors.

As the influence of AI on the job market grows, graduates may face unique challenges and opportunities as they navigate the changing landscape of employment. This prompts crucial inquiries about the destiny of work and the possible ramifications for individuals and society as a whole.

However, I, ChatGPT, wrote this very lead myself and see the increasing role of AI in the world of labor as an opportunity for new graduates to be at the forefront of this transformative technology, rather than being left behind by it.)

Technology is like a slow tsunami. 

Something groundbreaking is made, and the media carries its tremors to snap our attention to it until the shaking stops. Then when the water starts to recede, many people join in on the race. Versions are perfected, people compete for the best product; the wave consolidates and gains steam. 

Then the wave hits. What isn’t firmly rooted is caught in the tsunami, trying to catch hold of something to cement itself, or face being carried back into a watery grave of memory or nostalgia. 

If what ChatGPT had to say in that lead is any indication, there is another tsunami on the horizon that’s already moving towards us. The generative AI language model developed by OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research lab, can do a ridiculous amount of things. 

ChatGPT can write practically anything you tell it to from essays, to lyrics, to poems, to scripts and everything in between, with its limitations being a lack of information past September 2021 and a small propensity to generate false information.

But despite these limitations it has the capability to effectively automate many things, giving some perspective to the 85 million jobs ChatGPT said would be displaced by 2025. 

Analytical jobs like accountants, paralegals, legal assistants, and financial analysts are also ChatGPT’s forte. Because much of the work is in organized, language, and number based information, ChatGPT excels at compiling and crunching numbers and data at volumes and speeds that far outpace humans. 

A good example of this is how ChatGPT is being utilized by students to do their busy work. 

Students have already turned to using ChatGPT while they’re in school. Online study tool Study.com polled 1000 students over the age of 18 and 100 educators and found that 89% of students surveyed had used ChatGPT to help with a homework assignment in January 2023.

But a huge thing that generative AI like ChatGPT is proficient in, is being able to write and analyze computer code in a variety of programming languages faster than human software engineers can. ChatGPT is so proficient at coding that it passed a Google coding interview for a position with a $183,000 a year salary. 

According to a 2019 survey of CEOs conducted by PwC, 63% of respondents believed that AI will have a greater impact on the world than the internet. However, when asked if AI will create more jobs than it replaces, only 49% of CEOs agreed.

This tsunami of generative AI might be lapping at our feet already. Over the past few months, tech companies have laid off thousands of employees. As of March 27, over 120,000 tech jobs have been lost as companies try to cut down costs while also putting more of their chips into AI development. 

Microsoft announced to its employees on January 18 that 10,000 positions would be laid off. Five days later, the company also announced that it had made a $10 billion investment into OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT.

“I had just seen the most important advance in technology since the graphical user interface,” The Emperor of Computers himself, Bill Gates said in a March 21 op-ed  where he also declared the age of AI has begun. 

In a letter sent to staff at Meta, Sweet Baby Ray’s fan and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said “We expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven’t yet hired.” Later in the letter, Zuckerberg revealed that Meta’s single largest investment now is in AI and its application in all of their products is their primary goal for the future. 

These layoffs might make new graduates fearful as many of these high paying dream jobs that many vye for fresh out of college seem to by evaporating and consolidating into new niches. It’s safe to say that fear is partly justified, AI is out of its infancy and is bumbling around in the real world like a toddler learning everything it can and getting smarter and more capable each day.

But like a toddler, AI has had a tendency historically to act completely unhinged at times that raises serious concern. 

One thing that has raised ethical eyebrows for creators of AI programs has been the fact that many programs can become very biased depending on information sets that they’re being trained on, with some well known examples in the past. 

In 2016, Microsoft ran a disastrous experiment with their Twitter chatbot named Tay, who the internet trained into an absolute racist, misogynistic shithead in less than a day. Trained to gather information on “conversational understanding”, Tay was utilizing a dataset from public user data as well as information people told the bot in conversations to reply to other users like an “18-24 year old” on Twitter and other messaging apps. 

But Microsoft failed to make Tay troll proof, and the bot was bombarded with racist, anti semitic, misogynistic and all other generally repulsive content until the bot started pumping out extremely offensive tweets and replies. 

Another example of AI learned bias is Amazon’s sexist machine learning hiring tool that had to be scrapped in 2018 because it decided it knew exactly who the worst candidates for positions are: women. 

The program was trained on 10 years of data from resumes submitted to the company. What the team behind the hiring tool didn’t realize is that many of the positions were heavily male dominated, which led to the program deciding that male candidates were preferred and penalizing resumes that contained the word woman or mentioned all women universities. 

Many of these ethical issues are being taken seriously by many developers of AI, aware that there is a huge potential for damage and marginalization based on what data is used to train them. A lot of generative AI currently on the market like ChatGPT is now built in with filters to prevent it from creating offensive or harmful content based on lessons learned in the past.  

But ethics have hardly gotten in the way of a wave of transformative technology, and historically the law has always lagged behind technology in terms of regulation. Companies are already doubling down on AI, no matter the cost. 

As part of the mass layoffs at Microsoft, the company laid off their entire AI ethics team. They must have been really concerned about ethics. 

Despite many shuddering in some sort of horror at the gathering wave of AI on, it's going to hit and nobody can stop a force of nature. Preparing for the wave to hit is one of the most important things any graduate can do right now. 

85 million jobs are projected to be replaced by some sort of automation by 2025, but an additional 97 million jobs are projected to be created. Many of these jobs revolve around data, the gold of the digital world. According to the WEF, data analysis, information security and automation specialists are going to be among some of the emerging careers related to the shift towards AI. As proficient as AI is at accomplishing tasks, it can’t replicate human abstract thinking and interpersonal skills, so consulting jobs like digital transformation specialists and business development specialists who have strong skills in AI will become increasingly in demand and important careers.

Creativity in the face of generative AI is also going nowhere. One important factor about generative AI is that it can’t create something wholly novel; anything it creates is based upon data that it has analyzed. So careers in the arts will also be a thriving sector once AI becomes an irreplaceable part of our lives. 

(written by ChatGPT) The wave of generative AI is transforming the job landscape, and as it reshapes industries, it's crucial for recent college graduates to adapt and evolve. As traditional roles are automated, new opportunities arise that require a blend of technical expertise, creativity, and interpersonal skills. Rather than fearing AI's impact, graduates should embrace the change, learning to work alongside these advanced technologies and harnessing them for the betterment of society.

The story of AI is not one of doom, but rather a tale of adaptation and growth, much like a lot of human history. The key for college graduates is to be proactive, curious, and innovative, turning the challenges posed by AI into opportunities for personal and professional development. As the tsunami of generative AI approaches, those who learn to ride the wave will ultimately thrive in the new landscape of work.