The question of choosing a major for the 2023 college entrance examination. In the era of artificial intelligence, what majors do candidates need to choose to avoid being replaced by robots? With slowing global economic growth, what professions will be able to ride out the economic cycle safely? For most candidates, choosing a major is still a luxury freedom. However, the future employment situation remains a factor that must be taken into account. In the context of the depreciation of academic qualifications, choosing a major can even cross the school level to make up for the regret of failing the college entrance examination. Now, candidates face a new opponent – artificial intelligence – and need to consider how to avoid being replaced.
The impact of AI threats and changes in economic cycles on practitioners in industries such as design and concept painting. Midjourney、Disco Diffusion、DALL. AI drawing software such as E2 has chilled practitioners as early as 2022. At the beginning of this year, ChatGPT's amazing performance directly announced that the future has arrived. In addition to the AI threat, increased uncertainty in the global economy has exacerbated the pace of the industry's rise and decline, which can happen overnight. How to navigate the economic cycle and protect yourself from being replaced by AI is now facing young people for the first time in real and urgent terms.
The revolution and impact of AI on workers. Despite our commitment to unleashing productivity, migrant workers have become the object of AI revolution before they can feel the productivity revolution brought by AI. The U.S. unemployment report for May, released June 1 by challengers, showed that U.S. employers announced more than 130,000 layoffs that month. According to the report, the top three reasons for layoffs were the economic situation, spending cuts and company closures. Notably, AI caused about 3,900 employees to lose their jobs, or about 5% of the president's headcount, making it the tenth most common cause of layoffs in the report. This is the first time that challengers have included the impact of AI in their corporate layoff reports. There was no previous warning that "artificial intelligence is about to disrupt the job market."
Open AI's release of ChatGPT version 4.0 and the impact it could have on the job market. Open AI describes ChatGPT as a general-purpose technology that can be compared to a steam engine or printing press, and the impact on existing jobs can be very large. Open AI tested 1,016 occupations in the U.S. and found that about 19 percent of U.S. employees could improve task efficiency by more than 50 percent by applying ChatGPT, rising to 50 percent when considering other generative models and complementary technologies. Notably, the report also shows that highly educated, high-paying white-collar jobs are more affected, and that the jobs that apply to it may seem varied, but as long as they have processes or formula templates to follow, their inflated thresholds can be broken down in seconds. The Open AI report doesn't make a clear distinction between whether ChatGPT will increase or replace labor, but if it can cut a job's working hours in half, business owners may not be thinking about letting employees leave work a few hours early.
In Open AI's technical report, 34 occupations that are considered iron rice bowls in the AI era are listed, and except for athletes, all other occupations are blue-collar jobs involving hands-on ability. However, waves of automation throughout history have also hit these jobs. Back in 19th-century Britain, the Industrial Revolution led to the massive replacement of workers by machines, and laborers also launched campaigns against machines. However, with the complexity of machines, the importance of skilled workers has once again become prominent. Therefore, even if AI has not completely replaced blue-collar jobs, it will put forward new knowledge requirements for blue-collar jobs. In addition, the article also proposes that in the era of AI, the boundary between vocational education and university education may be re-examined, and the dividing line between blue collar and white collar workers is no longer so obvious. In the future, the difference between a good chef and a pre-made dish may lie precisely in their ability to rely on artificial intelligence to precisely control the cooking details, and to show the human spirit between the right amount and a little according to the taste of the guest.
In the era of AI, should you choose a computer major without brains? The article pointed out that in this wave of AI, the most ruthless layoffs are precisely Internet technology companies, such as Google, Twitter, Microsoft, IBM and other companies have completed or are preparing for large-scale layoffs. From the perspective of the positions laid off, grassroots programmers are a high-risk industry. Although the term "code farmer" is ridiculous, it also reveals that in today's Internet technology companies, the work of low-level programmers is no different from that of farmers, which is both hard work and lack of creativity. Programmers often laugh at themselves that their job is simple, just know Ctrl C and Ctrl V. Therefore, if you are not a code genius, it is recommended to apply for a computer science major and obtain a driver's license early for retreat.
While the development of AI has led to new career needs, such as Google and Microsoft recruiting in the field of large language models, Internet technology companies are also making large-scale layoffs. While jobs like AIGC may seem like the next job outlet, at today's rate of AI optimization, you may one day be optimized by yourself. For example, prompting the position of engineer, which has recently become popular, although it sounds promising, is essentially because the large language model is not yet perfect, it needs to be artificially fine-tuned, and will eventually be eliminated. Therefore, choosing an AI-related career requires looking at the development trend and future development prospects.
Even industries that are currently less affected by AI will gradually be affected. Therefore, we need to think about how to rediscover human dignity in the AI era. The author believes that compared with the blue-collar era, the AI era emphasizes the connection between people and emphasizes the value of people. Therefore, we need to focus on the development of interpersonal relationships and how to strengthen the connection between people.