A new report sounded the alarm on the future of the workplace as humans know it, listing the jobs most likely to be thrown into peril because of advanced artificial intelligence.
The list compiled by the UK Department of Education spells bad news for white collar workers, especially management consultants and business analysts, who are most at risk of having their jobs automated by AI.
It also warned that financial managers and directors, certified accountants and psychologists are at risk.
The government agency said it used a methodology that assessed 365 different jobs and their respective occupational and worker characteristics and compared them against 10 of the most common AI applications to see whether the roles could be automated by AI.
“The occupations most exposed to AI include more professional occupations, particularly those associated with more clerical work and across finance, law and business management roles,” the Education Department said.
Professionals working as purchasing managers and directors were the No. 5 most likely to lose their gig to AI, while economists and statisticians took the No. 6 spot on the list that was earlier reported on by the Daily Mail.
Finance and investment analysts, legal professionals and even the wide-ranging jobs considered “business and related associate” pro” roles made the list, in the eighth, ninth and tenth spots, respectively.
Listed among the the top 10 to 20 occupations most exposed to AI takeover: education advisers, human resource administrators, bookkeepers and payroll managers as well as administrative government workers and marketing associates, per the British department’s findings.
The UK Department of Education specified that it looked at generative AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard to make its conclusions, citing vaguely that it looked into other large language models, talk-to-text applications and image recognition AI.
On the other end of the spectrum, the agency found that the occupations least likely to be overtaken by AI include “more manual work that is technically difficult, in unpredictable environments and with lower wages … with the exception of sports players,” who are least likely to be replaced by the rapidly-advancing technology.
Hands-on workers who don’t have to be so concerned about AI’s takeover: roofers, construction occupations, cleaners, launderers, painters and decorators, gardeners and landscapers and road construction workers, among others.
The Education Department’s report comes one month after LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky said the gold standard of the bachelor’s degree is jeopardized by AI’s monumental rise.
“AI’s going to make it virtually impossible for a one-off moment of learning [like a degree] to last an entire career,” Roslansky said at the Talent Connect Summit, a conference of the country’s 2,000 top recruiters.
LinkedIn executives highlighted the “critical” need for up-skilling as AI technology develops, meaning that employee adaptability will be an expectation, rendering program-oriented four-year degrees virtually useless.
LinkedIn’s own data showed that occupational skills are projected to change by 65% by 2030, as job listings mentioning ChatGPT or similar generative AI have increased by more than 20-fold since last year, the social media site reported.
The CEO of job listing rival Indeed, Chris Hyams, said back in September that a result of technological innovation in the past decade, whole industries have turned “upside down,” and also warned that college-learned skills could become “obsolete.”
Even ChatGPT boss Sam Altman has alerted that AI poses a “risk of extinction” to humanity — and has prepped for this so-called doomsday by stocking up on guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water and gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force.
He also has “a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to” he said in a 2016 New Yorker interview.
Altman’s doomsday vision of AI gone wrong is commonplace in Silicon Valley, where a growing number of tech billionaires have poured money into post-apocalyptic contingency plans such as remote bunkers in recent years.
Some, such as Peter Thiel — PayPal founder and an initial OpenAI investor — and Google co-founder Larry Page, have snapped up land in New Zealand. The same New Yorker profile revealed Altman’s “backup plan” was to fly to New Zealand with Thiel if society crumbled.
Elon Musk has also sounded the alarm about the “dangerous” potential of advanced AI — warning it could destroy human civilization if left unchecked.
“AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production,” Musk said in a Financial Times interview earlier this year.
“In the sense that it has the potential — however small one may regard that probability, but it is non-trivial — it has the potential of civilization destruction,” Musk added.
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