Look Out Ai Is Coming For Your Job

---

 
When I retired in 2019, I registered a business on a whim, using “AI” in its name. I felt smug at being ahead of most people in keeping up with tech trends.
A friend, a real expert on artificial intelligence, who is also a professor at the world’s number one university, congratulated me for being in the “AI space”.
I sheepishly admitted the AI stood for my initials, and not quite for Artificial Intelligence!
But I still have that business name and will part with it to anybody willing to fund my retirement or until the real AI kills us all, whichever comes first.
AI is certainly trending right now. The launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 put the enormous power of AI at everybody’s fingertips.
The Chinese have also piled in with their own versions, bringing costs down and making it even more affordable for everyone. The impact will be enormous.
But first, some personal history of tech disruptions.
The height of cool
My first job was with a semiconductor company in Penang in the early 80s, a time when semiconductors formed the coolest sector to work in – jeans and t-shirts every day at the office and first-name basis with everybody including the Silicon Valley bosses when they came to visit the natives.
We had big computers, ironically called mini computers, in the Management Information System, or MIS, department. They were run by nerds with thick glasses who kept to themselves in incredibly cold rooms with raised floorings.
IBM’s Personal Computers – bulky desktop machines with two floppy disc drives – came early to us. We were merrily doing spreadsheets with Lotus 123 (no, it’s not a yoga position) and perfecting our words with Word Perfect when most people hadn’t even seen a computer.
We graduated to portable computers, which then literally cost as much as a Proton, for which you needed a very big, strong lap. Eventually, the MIS people became backroom staff tasked with keeping the lights on. They’re still nerdy, but no longer very cool.
The age of disruption
I then joined a telecommunications start-up that literally had more personal computers then employees. I was a very early sign-up to Hotmail (yes, I know how that name came about).
I still have that Hotmail address, in spite of giggles from the young ones. Antique email addresses can be cool, too, if you don’t care what others think.
Then I worked in a bank that pioneered computerisation in Malaysia. Computers then meant terminals with tiny orange screens and an ever-blinking cursor. Crude as they were, they allowed for things to be centralised and made more “efficient”.
Soon technology spawned another disruption – outsourcing. Hundreds of counter staff and clerical workers became redundant. Many were put into sales roles that most weren’t able to handle. There were many layoffs, “voluntary” in name, though not often in fact.
This drive for efficiency saw one of our bigger branches that once had over 60 staff – clerks, janitors, guards, drivers, officers etc – ending up with only four staff.
When one staff member was sick it became an emergency that required backup from other nearby branches.
Productivity, often measures of revenue or profit or cost per employee, went up. But so did the stress levels.
It’s us versus them
At work you were either one of the “elites” in finance or marketing or technology, and who were rewarded well, at times obscenely so, or one of the “others”.
Life became less pleasant for the “others”, and actually even for many of the “elites” too. People increasingly became expendable, and even more so with the rise of the “digital entrepreneurs”.
Companies increasingly became digital, which basically means the internet became the core of their business. Computers started existing elsewhere – in the “cloud” – and made many, including even the MIS nerds, redundant.
Once I offered an opinion, based on my experience, to a big organisation about its “digital journey”. It was that in such journeys there would be human casualties – people losing their jobs – which the company must be prepared to deal with.
No amount of training or retraining can help many of those affected. I’m not sure my rather gloomy advice got through.
Casulties of change
Anyway, here in my retirement, AI – not this AI- is merrily going about disrupting things. It’s early days yet, but the changes will be massive and unsettling. There’ll be many casualties, something I don’t think society is quite prepared to handle.
AI are already fighting wars, as we’re seeing in the battles in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza. Efforts to create rules and ethics about AI and ringfence its uses aren’t going anywhere. Once this genie is out of the bottle, there’s no putting it back in. For better or for worse, we’re stuck with it.
This time, those losing their jobs won’t just be those doing menial tasks, most of which have been “transformed” out already. Rather, the casualties this time will also be skilled managers and even professionals.
It increasingly feels like we’re in the world of the Matrix movies, where AI has overwhelmed the world and we’re desperately fighting for survival.
We’ll see soon enough whether the Matrix movies were prescient or just typical Hollywood fluff.
If you’re not up to speed with the latest technology, or even if you are, you risk being a casualty yourself. Many employers, especially in the public sector, are making promises they can’t keep about keeping jobs in the days of AI.
I wouldn’t dare to bet my jobs on those promises.
Making the big decisions
Recent research has shown the real beneficiaries of AI aren’t those who know how to write good prompts – everybody will be able to do that, soon enough.
The advantage rather goes to those experienced and smart enough to be able to interpret the information and make big bets and decisions from them.
In other words, the advantage again belongs to the “elites” and not to the rest of us. It’ll just exacerbate the widening gulf between the few who own and run big tech, and the rest of us common folks.
The rise of AI is also happening at a very unfortunate time in human history.
Sharing of a growing economic pie is becoming harder because of human conflicts and the changing climate and especially the rise of an increasingly toxic but powerful species – the tech business titans.
Facing the consequences
There’ll be unpleasant consequences for sure. In the early days of the internet there was optimism about it democratising knowledge and information.
That optimism has fallen by the wayside now, a victim of the law of unintended consequences.
Yes, there’s enough of that democratisation, but what’s becoming even more pervasive is the division and polarisation that has brought out the worse in us, often caused by a handful of people who have – as it’s been said – more money than God and who increasingly act as if they’re gods themselves.
And now these “gods” have an even more powerful and scary tool at their disposal.
Being AI myself – and retired – I have no fear of being replaced by the other AI. As for the rest of you, well, keep looking back over your shoulders. -FMT
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT

---