AI Will Replace More Than 25% of Jobs in the Industrialized World, Says OECD Report

More than 25 percent of jobs in the industrialized world will be replaced by artificial intelligence, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has said in a report.

“Governments must help workers to prepare for the changes and benefit from the opportunities AI will bring about …How AI will ultimately impact workers in the workplace and whether the benefits will outweigh the risks, will depend on the policy actions we take,” OECD Secretary General Mathias Cormann said, Reuters reported.

Representational Picture
Pixabay

Grim Outlook

In its 2023 Employment Outlook, the Paris-based organisation said some 27 percent of the labour force in OECD countries are engaged in jobs that are most likely to be replaced by AI. Eastern Europe is the most exposed region, according to the report.

Three out of five workers fear that they could lose their job to AI over the next 10 years, says the report prepared by OECD, which is a 38-member bloc mainly comprising the world’s wealthiest countries.

“While firms’ adoption of AI is still relatively low, rapid progress including with generative AI (e.g. ChatGPT), falling costs and the increasing availability of workers with AI skills suggest that OECD countries may be on the brink of an AI revolution,” the report says.

“When considering all automation technologies including AI, 27% of jobs are in occupations at high-risk of automation. Initial findings from a new OECD survey of AI’s impact in the manufacturing and finance sectors of seven countries highlight both the opportunities and risks that AI brings,” it adds.

According to researchers, ChatGPT and similar advanced AI bots will replace humans in several jobs in the future. The following are some of them, as per a Yahoo Finance report.

1. Programming, Software Engineers : Tech jobs like web developers, computer programmers, data scientists and coders can be replaced by AI technologies. Madgavkar said ChatGPT can produce faster coding with relative accuracy than humans.

2. Media: AI tools can disrupt jobs in content creation. The expert highlighted that ChatGPT is able to read, write and understand text-based data. She explained that analyzing and interpreting vast amounts of language based data and information is a skill that one would expect AI technologies to ramp up on. As such, journalism, creative writing and technical writing jobs would be replaced. It should be noted that CNET, a tech news platform, used an AI tool like ChatGPT to write dozens of articles and BuzzFeed is set to use tech from the ChatGPT maker to generate new forms of content.

3. Legal Industry: Paralegals, legal assistants, and language-oriented roles are susceptible to automation. Madgavkar said data is quite structured, very language-oriented, and quite amendable to generative AI. But AI won’t be able to fully automate these jobs as it requires a degree of human judgment to understand what the client wants. “It’s like a bit of productivity boost that some of these occupations might get, because you can use tools that actually do it better,” Madgavkar said.

4. Market Research Analysts: A senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, Mark Muro believes market research jobs would be taken over by AI tools because artificial intelligence is good at analyzing data and predicting outcomes. Market research analysts collect data, identify trends within the data and use the results to create effective marketing campaigns. Muro said this can be handled well by AI.

5. Finance Jobs: These are mainly to do with number crunching. Jobs, such as financial analyst, and personal financial advisor that require manipulating significant amounts of numerical data can be affected by AI. Muro pointed out that AI can identify trends in the market, highlight what investments in a portfolio are doing better and worse, use various other forms of data and forecast a better investment mix.

6. Traders: Wall Street jobs can be replaced by AI as its all about data, figures and forecasts. This can be better done by AI than humans who are hired right out of college and take huge amounts of salary.

7. Teachers: After students used ChatGPT to cheat on their homework, Pengcheng Shi from Rochester Institute of Technology, believes teachers should worry about their jobs. He said ChatGPT can easily teach classes and it can be trained to do so, that is, after the tool has been improved ÃÂ¢Ã¢’Â¬” bugs and inaccuracies gotten rid off

8. Graphic Designers: AI is already being used to create and generate images. One good example is DALL-E. An article in Harvard Business Review stated that upskilling millions of people in their ability to create and manipulate images will have profound impact on the economy. “Recent advances in AI will usher in a period of hardship and economic pain for those whose jobs are directly impacted and who find it hard to adapt.”

9: Customer Service: Jobs in customer service will definitely be affected. Companies are already deployed automatic answering systems or Chatbots to direct calls and sort out matters.

10. Accountants: This profession also deals with number crunching and balance sheets which can be easily achieved by AI. Brett Caraway, associate professor with the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology at the University of Toronto, said technology hasn’t put everybody out of job yet, but it does put some people out of a job. He explained that it is something new and will be interesting to see how disruptive and painful it would be for employment and politics.

According to a survey, 51 percent of employers are considering cutting roles and looking to deploy ChatGPT in their marketing and PR departments. Furthermore, the recent layoffs in Google and Microsoft cited focus on AI and automation. There are also concerns about the loss of human touch. But then this is just the beginning, it’s yet to be seen how far robotics and AI will go.

Source link