Even as AI models become progressively more capable it’s also becoming clear that they will end up impacting the workplace.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that AI will cause people to lose jobs. “People will lose jobs,” he said in an interview. But Altman indicated that there would be a silver lining. “Many new jobs will be created,” he added. “I think much better jobs.”
Altman said that people will have to adjust as these technical changes take place. “We feel a responsibility to educate society as we see it. We’ll be right about some things and wrong about others, and (will try) to be as good as we can at being stewards of this technology. But, you know, not everyone’s gonna like all of the impacts,” he said.
Altman though said that the the rise of AI was inevitable. “But this is coming. This is like this is a scientific achievement of humanity that is gonna get embedded in everything we do. The definition of work changes,” he said. “You know, someone that lived thousands of years ago that was trying to be like a subsistence farmer probably would look at what you and I do now and say that’s not really work. (They’ll say) they’re just having fun,” he explained.
“I think it will be clear once these robots are off doing all of these other things, and that there’s some special human things (that we do). And we don’t really care about that much what those robots do in the same way that we don’t care that much about the machines and factories making stuff for us, right?” Altman explained.
Altman seemed to be saying that the definition of work has continued changing with time. Until a few decades ago, there were jobs like telecom operators, who manually plugged in wires in central stations to connect phone calls. As technology improved, these jobs were taken over by machines, and these people found meaningful work in other kinds of roles without missing their old jobs so much. Altman similarly says that AI will take over many jobs and do them more efficiently, but humans will likely find other ways to meaningfully occupy themselves. And while Altman does make a compelling point, the pace and scale of this change as brought about by AI might be unprecedented — and there might be a lot of disruption in traditional job roles while humans scramble to find jobs that are suitable to them.