What Effect ChatGPT Will Have on White-Collar Work

Since the invention of technology, highly educated workers have not experienced widespread job loss. Will the exception be generative AI? Download the Hark app to hear additional audio stories. It is likely that AI will start to reduce employment for college-educated workers within the next five years.

The ability of technology to perform tasks that were previously thought to require a high level of education and skill will increase as it develops.

As businesses look for ways to reduce costs by automating processes, this could result in the displacement of workers in some industries. Although it is challenging to foresee the precise scope of this trend, it is obvious that AI will have a significant impact on the job market for workers with college degrees.

In a world where more and more tasks are being carried out by machines, it will be critical for people to stay current on the most recent advancements in AI and to think about how their skills and expertise can be used.

So there you have it, I guess: ChatGPT says it's coming for both your and my jobs. Two months ago, OpenAI, one of the nation's most significant artificial-intelligence research organisations, released the artificially intelligent content producer, whose name is short for "Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer." Simply put, the technology is amazing. With the following instruction: "write a five-sentence paragraph in the style of The Atlantic about whether AI will start to reduce employment for college-educated workers in the next five years," and it instantly generated that first paragraph.

A few other astounding generative AI tools that were recently released include the video generator Synthesia, the image generators Midjourney and DALL-E, and ChatGPT. The benefit of these AI tools is clear: they will generate a tonne of digital content, quickly and affordably. Students already use ChatGPT to assist them with their essay writing.

ChatGPT is being used by businesses to write copy for their websites, promotional materials, and customer service inquiries. It is used by academics to create footnotes and by lawyers to create legal briefs (ChatGPT, incidentally, passed the Multistate Bar Examination's torts and evidence sections).

However, an extraordinary drawback is also readily apparent: What happens if platforms like ChatGPT start to eliminate jobs for copywriters, journalists, customer service representatives, paralegals, coders, and digital marketers?

Technology experts have been predicting for years that flexible, inventive AI will threaten white-collar jobs as robots replace skilled office workers whose positions were once thought to be immune to automation. Analysts envision AI permanently changing the employment landscape in its most extreme iteration. According to one Oxford study, 47% of American jobs may be in danger. In recent memory, no single technology has resulted in widespread job losses among highly educated workers.

The exception that generative AI will really be Given how recent the technology is and how slowly employment can change in response to technological change, nobody can provide an answer to this question. But according to technology experts, AI is actually unique because it makes it possible to automate a variety of tasks that were previously impossible.

"In the past, development was linear and predictable. The computer carried out the steps that you determined. One of the foremost authorities on employment and technological change, MIT professor David Autor, told me that it simply followed the procedure without learning or improvising. Nevertheless, ChatGPT and similar programmes improvise, threatening to undermine a significant portion of white-collar employment whether or not jobs are lost.

Let alone how to use them to develop new products, improve business processes, and increase employee productivity, people and businesses are still learning how to use emerging AI technologies. If the past is any indication, this procedure might take longer than you anticipate. Think about electricity. Early in the nineteenth century, electric lights, motors, and circuits were created.

But it took another century for the widespread use of electricity in the US to start increasing GDP. Or consider computers. Although they were commercially available by the early 1950s, the productivity statistics did not include them until the late 1990s. There is no doubt that some technologies increase productivity and decrease the need for labour. Automated machine tools, for instance, as well as many other types of machinery developed and used since the Industrial Revolution, reduce manufacturing employment while increasing output and productivity.

However, the effects of other technologies—even amazing ones—are surprisingly subdued. What about the internet, which over the past forty years has transformed virtually every aspect of communication? The internet "fails the hurdle test as a great invention," according to economist Robert Gordon in 2000, because it "provides information

and entertainment more cheaply and conveniently than before, but much of its use involves substituting existing activities from one medium to another." This is true even though it has changed how we date, talk, read, watch, vote, emote, and record our own life stories, launched a zillion businesses, and made however many fortunes.

Nearly 25 years later, the internet has still not resulted in a productivity revolution.

Neither has a smartphone. So, is AI similar to a smartphone or a machine tool that runs automatically? Is San Francisco about to become the Rust Belt, or is it about to change how work is done without actually eliminating many jobs? According to Autor, it can be challenging to predict the industries where technology will result in job losses. Do you recall the uproar that occurred a few years ago when it was thought that truck drivers might lose their jobs as a result of self-driving cars?

However, AI is much more inventive and flexible than a Google Doc or a system like Excel. Furthermore, engineers frequently need to laboriously and painstakingly update other types of software, whereas AI systems get better and better as they use and consume more data. Typically, businesses will use machines instead of people when they can.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can perform tasks currently performed by paralegals, copywriters, producers of digital content, executive assistants, beginning computer programmers, and, yes, some journalists. This suggests that these positions may soon change.

Even though ChatGPT can produce a decent paragraph on AI, it is unable to conduct expert interviews, locate historical documents, or evaluate the quality of studies on technological change and employment. It does not have any authority, understanding, capacity for self-correction, or ability to recognise genuinely novel or intriguing ideas, so it simply creates content out of what is already available.

That suggests that while a huge amount of simpler content is produced, AI may increase the value of original journalism and the productivity of investigative journalists. While humans will write in-depth stories, AI may churn out lists and summaries of public meetings. AI will in many ways improve how people use their expertise, according to Autor.

We'll specialise more as a result, A wide range of industries could become more productive thanks to AI, with relatively little impact on overall employment. The co-founder of AI-driven small business ClearCOGS is Matt Wampler. He told me that he has spent his entire career as a "restaurant guy." He claims that despite having slim profit margins, grocery stores and restaurants frequently waste a lot of food. Burgers aren't as popular as spaghetti, and buns are frequently discarded.

He explained to me that restaurants tend to lag behind in technology. "They all centre on people. People are managing and serving other people. And in that incredibly human-centred world, giving people problems is the standard course of action. Phil will carry it out. To make restaurants' books leaner and more profitable, ClearCOGS uses AI-powered modelling to combine customer order histories, supply data, and labour data.

The system will alert the chef or manager to buy more pasta and fewer rolls if customers are starting to order more spaghetti than hamburgers. Wampler said to me, "We put this in place in some of my cousin's sandwich shops. "Simple solutions to simple problems

They needed an answer to the following: An assistant manager works the night shift and must choose whether to bake another tray of bread or not a few hours before closing. We answer that question. Really, the use of ChatGPT is not replacing human labour; local sandwich shops are not hiring McKinsey consultants.

However, it might increase the overall efficiency of the food service. AI, like social media before it, has the potential to alter our lives and how we spend our time, even if it doesn't help the economy. The immersiveness of video games might increase. Shops may have much better sales copy and graphics. Perhaps movies look better.

YouTube's hidden videos might evolve into something far stranger and prettier. Additionally, we might see a lot more formulaic content than we do now. (More concerningly, there might be a great deal of disinformation online that seems plausible.)

The greatest risk for workers, according to Autor, is that AI technologies lead to an abrupt change in the type of labour employers desire. Many call centre agents or marketers could lose their jobs if certain specialisations are eliminated. However, he emphasised the advantages of having such technology at our disposal. For years, productivity has been stagnant. The benefits of machines doing a little bit more work are substantial.  (Lowrey)