essence
- automation effect. Generative AI will wipe out entire sectors and industries, including white-collar jobs.
- positive disturbance. Disruption caused by artificial intelligence can lead to positive social and economic changes.
- Concern for displacement. The impact of AI on white-collar jobs will generate more interest and concern than the impact on manual workers, leading to potentially positive change for all workers..
a Recent New York Times story The title posed the following question – the one that’s been on the mind of anyone who makes a living using only their brains: “Messing around in ChatGPT, Workers Wonder: Will This Take My Job?”
In my opinion, the answer to this question is “Yes!”
The massive impact of generative AI on jobs
Yes, ChatGPT, along with the massive wave of other AI-powered smart technologies, apps, tools, gadgets, will indeed eliminate not only jobs, but complete sectors. Not only will the disruption be massive and widespread, but it will also be rapid.
Positive change: moving away from the late stage of capitalism
But rather than the fear which we all justifiably feel, I think this development is an eminently positive development for anyone who thinks that unless we move away from our late-stage capitalist arrangement, in which economic growth is fueled exclusively by the doctrine of maximizing profits at all costs, an unimaginable catastrophe is Our impending collective destiny.
Let me explain.
Related article: ChatGPT is all the rage but don’t stop learning yet
The loss of white-collar jobs and the uproar that will follow
First, it’s important to note that what ChatGPT and Generative AI will do for white-collar workers is what “labor-saving devices” (as they were called back when their introduction began) have done and continue to do for over 100 years for workers and blue-collar workers. In other words, this — no doubt, a massive, relentless push to lower the cost of production in pursuit of greater bottom line profit — is by no means a new thing.
Now, what is new, however, is that while no one but those who have lost their jobs cares much about the fate of manual workers (certainly not white-collar workers, who rarely or never feel empathy for those who have suffered, other than telling their children to work hard and get on good grades, lest they end up like wretched and miserable), in the case of losing office jobs, expect something completely different. He expected a general uproar and clamor from a wide section of workers who hitherto felt it, though far from where they thought they ought to be, since they had already gone to school and got good grades, and had worked so hard to get those extravagant grades. pricey, and in fact they don’t give up a not insignificant part of their paychecks to pay for those degrees–that on the whole, and especially in comparison with those who use their hands–the situation is tolerable enough.
Related article: ChatGPT is really replacing humans in the workplace
Beyond white-collar jobs: The impact on elite professionals
And AI will not just gobble up the jobs of these workers. It would also detract from the interest of those who had hitherto enjoyed glamorous, uneventful jobs: advisors, researchers, professors, and “experts” (not to mention those around them who essentially occupy what anthropologist David Graeber has recently called “bullshit jobs”).
Indeed, as a result of this tremendous upheaval that will affect the “best and brightest” among us, we will no longer hear the same plain and quiet speech we heard when what was perished were the blue-collars tired. Talk like, “Well, that’s the ‘price’ we have to ‘pay’ for progress, because ‘pain’ and ‘disorder’ were nothing but the ‘cost’ of such ‘progress’ (I’m putting the emphasis here only on the most obnoxious euphemisms that Often used by those who speak it, coldly and heartlessly), it will start to sound callous and inconsiderate.” Manual workers—they didn’t really have any powerful lobbies behind them, with unions really their only recourse—and we all know how disemboweled unions became And the completely open—automatism was celebrated cheerfully, by those unaffected by it, while those who suffered its consequences (depression, alcoholism, family breakdown, even suicide) did so quietly and unseen. It’s a whole different ball game when it comes to annoying those who only use their brains to make a living.
Labor Exodus: A Major Social and Economic Issue
Well, now that white-collar jobs are unofficially evaporating, watch how “labor exodus” will become a very important social and economic issue indeed (equally, we shall be told, with the “opioid epidemic”—another example of a protracted disaster suddenly becoming critical). When the victims are no longer uninterested in the minority). They expected legislation and policies to be introduced and quickly enacted to help the displaced, just as a trillion and some dollars were printed and distributed when the coronavirus hit, and the potential for severe disruption loomed large and real.
Legislation and policies to assist displaced workers
So yeah, I say “go AI” and disrupt society as much as possible so we can finally start making some much needed, much overdue, stalled progress (no scary quotes in this case) that isn’t focused on ensuring that, in the name of some voodoo, hocus pocus As it flows down the economy, wealth continues to focus more intensely and at the tip of an increasingly narrow pyramid, but on the welfare and well-being of flesh-and-blood human beings, including those grim evidence of workers.
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