You are in the top 1% of the world in your skill set or specialization, but you probably won't have the risk of replacing it with artificial intelligence. That is probably the only thing that can be said with some degree of confidence about the future of work (and skills) in the age of AI.
Openai is a nonprofit that led the “revolution” of AI generated when launching chatbots based on large-scale language model technology, and estimated whether AI would replace humans (skills). We concluded that AI replaces about 10% of 80% tasks and 50% of 19% tasks.
This means that artificial intelligence, according to Openai, takes over 19% of the unemployed, half of the workers, and can effectively automate some of the majority of jobs. I think these are conservative estimates.
In recent months, many technical experts, such as Bill Gates, have argued that AI has caused massive disruption to the work world, unemployment among a huge number of people, and that it needs to retrain tens of millions of people. As far as Gates says AI saves only 3-5 occupations and makes the rest redundant.
For countries like ours, Openai estimates can easily be reversed. 50% of 80% of tasks could be automated, and the next 19% could be automated. This means that in certain types of occupations (mostly knowledge workers), 80% of people can become “half” unemployed. The reason for this is that the majority of Pakistanis (like perhaps 90%) are usually performing medium to low levels of knowledge work. We have content writers, designers, coder developers, accountants, lawyers and teachers etc.people who do things that machines can easily do, rather than perform at the cutting edge. It can be exchanged. Many of these people risk replacing them with machines. Or other people who are more plausible and use machines.
For example, see content writing, graphic design, and social media marketing. Today, one prompt, or master design, allows AI to easily create hundreds of copies of various texts for blogs, websites, or social media. Previously there were teams of people trying to create these variations and different adaptations. Today, perhaps even better things can be done easily by those using AI.
This has a major impact on the future of work and skills, especially for young people.
There is no denying that AI will remain here. And whether we can move on to the next frontier of Artificial General Information (AGI) means that we can create machines that can completely replace humans and even threaten the existence of our species.
Second, the only way to counter the resulting skills and occupational disruption is to learn how to complement what you already do with AI and try to use it to make it better. In the near future, one person will use AI to do 3-4 (or more) jobs. There could be improved productivity among those who embrace AI and learn to use it effectively, and massive disruption among those left behind.
Third, AI creates opportunities for us to enhance the quality of our work and intellectual value when used properly. AI (particularly early research into the use of AI by teachers and students) requires that AI lead to learning losses and cognitive short-circuits, but users tend to become too dependent on the output of AI, so effective use requires learning how to supplement (and work) your own knowledge.
Using AI effectively returns to the core ideas of education, the educational system's core objectives.
Take computer programming. Today there is a lot of debate about whether AI can be programmed like humans. AI can't programmers and the best programmers, but at least as well as the average coder, it can't programmers in regular coding tasks. Now, with clues, large companies like Microsoft and Amazon are experimenting with AI (human + AI combination) to replace programmers. With hundreds of thousands of programs listed on the salary, even a 15-20% reduction means tens of thousands of jobs losses. Survivors focus on higher-level tasks, including architecture, design, algorithms, and check-testing. etc. Leave your everyday, ordinary coding on your machine.
Even in other fields and occupations, those who can learn to use AI properly can focus on higher-order thinking and work rather than on the usual, repetitive tasks. Teachers can now focus on critical thinking rather than checking the learner's language.
In fact, using AI effectively returns to the core ideas of education, the critical thinking that our education system has struggled with.
In the early days of generative AI, there was a sudden trend of learning “prompt” engineering, a flashy name given to questions so that they could optimize how AI answers. Part of rapid engineering involves understanding how AI and LLMS work and based on that, learning some tricks to trigger a particular element in that response. But the majority of quick engineering is learning to ask the right questions.
What rapid engineering teaches us is to take AI responses, absorb them, and come up with more intelligent questions. This is another name for critical thinking. What else is critical thinking, is asking questions and asking questions.
So AI has brought us back to basics. We need to learn to think critically to ensure we can do well and thrive in the age of AI. The good thing is that there are the tools you need to do this. For decades, we've been talking about personalized learning, but we didn't have the tools to do with it. With generative AI and LLM, you have the tools you need to serve everyone and help you learn what we want and at the pace we want.
Personalized learning could ultimately become a killer app for education.
AI, even in its current imperfect form, will bring great dents to the world of work and skills. If used effectively, it could free most of us from many tasks. Many tasks are mediocre and repetitive, releasing mind and time to do higher orders.
Another new realm is the AI Agent and Agent AI space, where you can use AI to perform many tasks and make decisions along the way. AI agents can run the entire social media campaign very quickly, allowing itinerary and booking to act as travel agents and sales reps or buyers.
There is already one company, working with 5-50 AI agents, employees are building products and pushing them to the market to sell them.
This creates a world of possibilities for those who want to build a business at a low cost, and perhaps even improves the likelihood of success.
Now there is a clear duty to teach all people, not just young, regardless of their profession. AI skills help you use them more effectively to improve productivity and quality of your work.
We have to act ourselves to acquire AI skills in order to be among three people who do the job (human + AI) than those who have become redundant at work.
The time to act is now.
The writer is a former member of the Planning Committee. He is currently a managing partner of Innoventures Global (Pvt) Ltd and is co-founder of Paggpt, a platform that promotes AI skills and education. He can visit athar.osama@gmail.com.
