The robots took over.!?

Published: 20 October, 2023

By: brainmatter

I keep hearing alot of people sharing a variety of thoughts and opinions on AI and its relation to the job market. The main conclusion to most of these thoughts and opinions is that AI will be / currently is taking over alot of the things humans do. While there is some truth to that, I believe alot of it has to do with irrational fear mongering.

Before I continue, I would just like to say that whatever I say should be taken along side your own research, rationale, and a grain of salt. My words are food for thought more than anything else.

According to the population of the Internet AI currently is / will be taking alot of jobs away from people. Jobs in a variety of sectors including but not limited to sales, art/design, tech, communications, finance, legal, etc. At first glance anyone reading these blog posts & tweets would say, "Oh fuck, it's true! The robot uprising is really happening." but let me help you look at this from a different perspective.

I work at an ad agency. We do digital, creative, and everything in-between. As AI started getting increasingly popular around mid 2022, the first thing I heard was Dall-E will take away the job of the designer. Clickbait fueled videos and articles flooded all avenues of social media trying to convince people that yes AI generated images will replace hardworking designers. This is simply not the case for many reasons. For starters Dall-E (and systems similar) are impressive but fail to do what designers can do. At the end of the day it is just another tool / resource for designers to use for a faster workflow or more inspiration. Humans have a "magical part" to them that an algorithm simply can not produce. It can replicate it to an extent but it can not produce it.

I work as a web developer and for the past few months I've been leveraging ChatGPT to help me build & scale code faster. ChatGPT can't build out / structure an entire application for me but it can help me get things done faster. I recently read an interesting NY Times piece talking about the end of programming. The article has some interesting points suggesting a new breed / evolved version of programming being birthed because of AI but I still would like to argue the fact that AI will still continue to be a tool that aids us to be better and faster. I don't believe that it is a competition. It's still a good idea to go get that Computer Science degree, or start that bootcamp, or even just pickup a book on how to learn to program (if you even remotely give a shit about any of that).

Alot of people are concerned that AI chatbots will replace entire customer service teams. I don't believe this is the whole truth either. I do agree human interactions in customer service have gone down since the introduction of chatbots but the same can be said about automated phone options. The productive end goal here is to have less people answer the same generic and repetitive questions / answers over and over again. Speaking from personal experience, a client requested we look into an AI chatbot solution to help save their teams time from answering these repetitive questions.

In my opinion AI is the latest technology on the hot seat. We're looking at AI in the same taboo as we look at nuclear energy. I'm not denying that there are concerns but I believe that is merely another tool for us to wield. The same things being said about AI have been said about other technological advancements in the automation industry.

The Home Depot has to be one of my favorite stores to go to and there's something very interesting I've noticed over the course of a few years which I think about often. When they first introduced self-checkout they got rid of alot of people. Alot of people hated the self-checkouts and just didn't have a good experience in general (this is for many reasons, the tech being bad, things not working properly, instructions not being clear, etc). A few months after they started introducing attendants who would manage the self-checkouts and help customers with any major issues. This made checkout go alot easier and smoother. People worked along side machines to have the best of both worlds (I mean it's a fucking Home Depot but...).

My point is that I don't believe we are easily replaceable. I hope you believe that as well. We are special and our specialty can't be replicated by an algorithm. There are two good outcomes to this whole situation: we use these tools to our advantage to excel and we focus more on what exactly separates us from a machine to excel us at whatever we're doing. I really enjoyed reading this article which conveys some of my exact thoughts and sentiments.

I have alot to say about this topic but now I think it's time to close it off here. Till next time.!?