ChatGPT: How A.I. could impact the job market and employee skills
The team on Yahoo Finance Live discusses how ChatGPT and A.I. could impact jobs in some categories, including finance, journalism and education.
Video Transcript
DAVE BRIGGS: Is ChatGPT a jobs killer? Well, who better to ask than ChatGPT itself. The AI told me, quote, "It can potentially replace jobs that involve generating written content, such as writing news articles, product descriptions, or social media posts. It could also potentially assist with tasks such as customer service and technical support. However, it is important to note that ChatGPT is not intended to replace human workers but rather to assist them and improve efficiency."
If, however, you prefer a human answer to that question, here's one of the smartest humans we know, MIT professor and author Sinan Aral, who told us it's one of the greatest upheavals in the labor market we've seen in a long time, adding this.
SINAN ARAL: It will displace jobs. It will create what's known to economists as skill-biased technical change, technical change that favors some skills and complements some skills and substitutes for or competes with other skills. And every time in human history that we have experienced something like this, we've had to reskill and change our focus on what humans did and what machines did in order to create complementarities and increase welfare across the board.
DAVE BRIGGS: So if I'm in college, kids, I'm rethinking what my potential major might be based on what jobs might exist 10 years from now because, rest assured, ChatGPT is coming for your job. Even if it does not intend to, your bosses will wonder, can I replace each of these people with artificial intelligence? You saw what happened to the BuzzFeed stock.
SEANA SMITH: Oh, I saw.
DAVE BRIGGS: It's inevitable.
SEANA SMITH: It is inevitable. It's a little bit scary when we start to think about all of this and, of course, just what exactly jobs it is going to replace. In terms of the degree of that, the CEO of Automation Anywhere, he was at Davos weighing in on this. And of course, he is involved in AI, so maybe a bit biased here. But he was saying it could replace up to 70% of all the work we do in front of a computer, saying that up to 70% of that could be automated. That really puts it in perspective just in terms of how many jobs could be at risk.
And like, Dave, what you're saying, kids need to be thinking about-- kids that are in college, kids that are in high school. You have to have this in the back of your mind just in terms of what that space is going to look like 10, 15 years from now because, according to some estimates, 30% of US professionals are already using AI on a daily basis within their work. So it's starting to tick up there, just the popularity of it. Now we've got ChatGPT in it.
JARED BLIKRE: Yes. I'm not so concerned about ChatGPT as I are its descendants-- that is son of ChatGPT, daughter of Chat, whatever-- because this is not going to be limited to the realm of just typing and being in front of your computer. This is going to be uploaded to lifelike robots. I think everybody is going to have a domestic-- or most people are going to have a domestic servant in 10, 15 years--
SEANA SMITH: Oh my goodness.
JARED BLIKRE: --a robot that does a lot of chores. I think we're going to come to realize that we're not that intelligent, we're not that special, and we're really all here just to entertain--
SEANA SMITH: Painting a pretty dire picture. It's a Friday afternoon, bud.
DAVE BRIGGS: Whoa, man.
JARED BLIKRE: --entertain ourselves. This is-- no, this is uplifting. We're here to entertain ourselves.
SEANA SMITH: OK.
JARED BLIKRE: All right? And ChatGPT is going to help, all right? All this serious work we're doing, a lot-- 90% of this just going to be automated. You know, people looked at the 1950s. They saw automobiles and all these robots coming into their facilities. This isn't going to eliminate jobs. It's going to create new ones. People are going to have more leisure time. Talk about the five-day, the four-day, the three-day, the two-day workweek. Guess what?
SEANA SMITH: Now you're talking.
JARED BLIKRE: This is a win-win for everybody.
SEANA SMITH: Now you're talking.
JARED BLIKRE: Come on. Pick up your UBI at the local-- at the local [INAUDIBLE] facility.
DAVE BRIGGS: Oh, man. On National Have Fun at Work Day, Jared just killed off 70% of workers in the US economy.
JARED BLIKRE: 90.
DAVE BRIGGS: 90.
SEANA SMITH: 90% of our daily tasks, too.
DAVE BRIGGS: Now, look. We talked earlier in the program about how many professions are having massive shortages across the country. And the real problem is none of them are the five professions that we put up on the screen that experts do think will see the most impact. And those are education, finance, software engineering, journalism, and graphic design. Those are not the fields that we're suffering from massive shortages in.
Can they fly planes? Can they be nurses? Can they drive trucks? That's where we need them. Can they be accountants, though? That, I think, might be a potential solution.
JARED BLIKRE: Well, if you want somebody--
SEANA SMITH: I feel better about an accountant than a nurse if we're coming up those two options.
JARED BLIKRE: If you want an Enron-style accountant, yeah, you're going to have to go to a human. ChatGPT-- not wired to do that kind of stuff.
