Volunteering to fill out the report is a brain-burning thing than the college entrance examination itself. Majors, colleges, cities, all of which affect the direction of candidates in the next few years and even in their lives. In today's era of rapid diploma depreciation, students will not only play with their peers, but also deal with a new opponent - artificial intelligence.
For example, in May this year, GPT-4 was reported to have passed the four major accounting industry qualification examinations that are recognized as difficult, with an average score of 85.1. This has caused a lot of anxiety for those who are studying, and some people have commented under related reports: "Is it about to be replaced if you bother to take the exam?" ”
This is not unfounded, computers, translation, jurisprudence... If you search for the positions corresponding to these majors plus AI as a keyword, you will see that many professionals have expressed concerns about being replaced by AI, and some have even encountered the problem of changing jobs or even losing their jobs due to AI.
So how to choose a major to avoid the impact of AI? What kind of jobs are less likely to be replaced by AI in the future?
In March, Goldman Sachs released a report on the impact of artificial intelligence on employment, "The Potentially Large Effects of Artific ialIntelligence on Economic Growth," in which 13 of 39 job activities were judged to be AI-capable. Based on this analysis framework, we evaluated and calculated the AI substitution index for nearly 20,000 tasks under more than 900 jobs in the O*NET database.
The results found that more than 60% of the tasks that can be replaced by AI accounted for 31.1% of all non-manual labor positions, but the work that AI can be 100% competent for is not yet available.
If you want to check the feasibility of AI alternatives for jobs and which tasks AI may be better at than you, you can scan the QR code above to get the full data for free. In addition, the career information of the O*NET database is based on the survey situation in the United States, which is not completely consistent with the domestic situation, and the AI job replacement analysis released by the City Data Group is based on the analysis of recruitment data for 1.64 billion positions in China, and interested readers can go to view.
How will AI affect or even reshape our work? Should we respond positively and embrace it? Or do you want to adopt a strategy of contempt and avoid self-confusion? The answers to these questions not only depend on the development and application of AI technology today, but may also be hidden in the past. How has technology shaped careers since the Industrial Revolution? This history may bring some inspiration to us who encounter the technological singularity today.
Electrical, computer... AI isn't the first new technology to panic humans
On May 2 this year, tens of thousands of Hollywood screenwriters went on strike, and this time they took aim at AI - demanding that AI drafts be modified and that AI-generated content be added to film and television productions. Screenwriters worry that AI will steal writers' jobs while devaluing "the dignity and value of human labor."
While this is the first time humans have gone on strike to boycott AI, it's not the first time humans have resisted new technologies. In the industrial revolution of more than two hundred years, textile machines, steam engines, automatic telephones... These tools, which seem commonplace today, also caused panic and fierce resistance when they first appeared.
In 1965, when computers began to be used in the office, American writer Eric Hofer warned in the New York Times: "A group of skilled Americans is deprived of meaning and value." This statement is the same as the reason Hollywood screenwriters protest AI today.
And the logic behind this is well understood. Electric lights make city lightmen no longer needed, operators redundant with automatic telephones, and "if something threatens one's livelihood, it's natural to boycott it." For most urban dwellers, skills are their capital, and they are feeding their families because of this human capital. Oxford University researcher Carl M. B. Frey wrote in The Technology Trap.
But if you think that the emergence of new technologies will only briefly harm a small number of people, and the beneficiaries will be even greater, then it may not be.
In the first industrial revolution, the standard of living of ordinary people in Britain did not improve, or even regressed. According to economic historian Charles M. H. Feinstein's research shows that from 1770 to 1840, the wage growth of British workers not only did not catch up with GDP, but also lagged significantly behind the rise in prices. Due to poor factory working conditions and poor sanitation in rapidly expanding cities, the average life expectancy of Britons living in industrial cities has declined. Correspondingly, most of the increase in wealth brought about by technological progress has been taken away by industrialists. It was not until the completion of the British Industrial Revolution in 1840 that ordinary people gradually felt the dividends of technological change, but the previous "short" 70 years were enough to span a person's life.
Moreover, the dividends of technological progress are not guaranteed to be shared equally with all. Branko Milanovich, an economist known for proposing the "elephant curve," pointed out that two of the three industrial revolutions in history have seen income inequality rise.
"In the computer age, inequality has increased in large part because new technologies have greatly rewarded those with higher skills, and the wage gap has widened further as middle-income routine jobs have been crushed and unskilled workers have moved to low-wage service jobs," Milanovic said. "And now AI has the potential to affect some white-collar jobs just as the computer revolution has replaced some blue-collar jobs."
Although OpenAI founder Sam Altman assured that with the massive productivity resources that AI brings, "it can push for greater equality in human society." But looking back at past industrial revolutions, technological innovation does not guarantee this. What caused the Gini coefficient of the Anglo-American countries to decline significantly during the Second Industrial Revolution may have been factors other than technology. Carl S. In his book The Technology Trap, B. Frey argues that two world wars and the Great Depression destroyed the wealth of the rich, and the subsequent rise of the welfare state also promoted the adjustment of the distribution of wealth in society.
On June 20, Huang Qifan, executive vice chairman of the Academic Committee of the China National Innovation and Development Strategy Research Association, warned in an article published on the Outlook Think Tank that AI may trigger the fourth industrial revolution: "Without government intervention, artificial intelligence will greatly increase social inequality and bring about a greater class gap." ”
Technology has been reshaping our work
In May, Microsoft released its 2023 annual Work Trend Index report, which focused on employees' perceptions of artificial intelligence. The results show that 49% of respondents are concerned about the impact of AI on their jobs.
This anxiety is largely based on the fact that AI will cause its own jobs to disappear. A Goldman Sachs report released in March predicted that in the future, about two-thirds of jobs in Europe and the United States will be subject to some degree of AI automation.
But in reality, advances in technology have been reshaping our job needs. For example, agriculture, which originally required a lot of labor, released a lot of manpower due to the emergence of machines such as tractors; The development of home appliances has also liberated a large number of women from unpaid housework and allowed them to enter the workplace. The office cubicle that white-collar workers take for granted today has been invented for less than a century.
In addition to affecting the number of jobs absorbed by various industries, technology also has a significant impact on the various jobs themselves.
Before the 1980s, because color film technology was not popular, ordinary people who wanted to obtain color photos had to rely on colorists in photo studios. This profession is mainly responsible for coloring black and white photos. Because of the high difficulty factor and long operation time, color photos are very expensive. But with the advent of color photo technology and the advent of digital cameras, color photos were no longer rare, and the job of colorist quickly faded from memory. However, the iterative upgrade of camera technology has also spawned more demand for the originally monotonous studio photography, and new jobs such as later retouchers and travel photographers have emerged.
So, contrary to people's intuitive perception, the development of technology brings many more new jobs than it erases. Economist David Otto and others found in a study last year that 60 percent of current jobs did not exist in 1940.
Even the job with the same name changes at different times as technology evolves.
For example, the familiar job of secretary, before the advent of personal computers in the 80s of the 20th century, its responsibilities basically revolved around typewriter typing and material archiving. But with the advent of computers in the office, typing and filing jobs that once took up much of a secretary's working time have been significantly reduced.
In contrast, secretarial work shifts from serving one individual to assisting an entire department or organization. In 1970, seventy percent of secretaries worked for only one person. In 1987, a secretary supported an average of 5.3 people, and by 2001 that number had risen to 12.3.
The picture on the left shows a secretary job posting in a newspaper in Florida in 1966, which frequently mentions typing skills; The picture on the right shows a secretary job posting in a Florida newspaper in 2006, which requires more diverse skills.
Now, with the advent of AI tools that excel at voice transcription, meeting notes, and even coordinating work schedules, the secretarial role may be about to change again.
AI's reshaping of work will not happen overnight
In 1858, an American named Hamilton Smith built the world's first washing machine in Pittsburgh, which caused panic among many people, fearing that women would lose a means of earning a living. A subsequent article in the New York Times reassured everyone that there is no need to worry about the impact of the new machine: "The washing machine can reduce labor, save handwork, and free us from the fatigue and many unpleasantness caused by hand washing." But washing machines are not meant to replace, and will not replace, the jobs of single young women. ”
The predictions of the article turned out to be quite accurate. In fact, for 50 years after the advent of washing machines, the number of laundry women in the United States has been rising. Another important reason why this occurs, in addition to poor laundry results and even damage to clothes, is that it is too expensive. Until the 20s of the 20th century, when the price of the cheapest washing machine fell to 3 weeks' salary of an ordinary person, this kind of machine that can save a lot of housework time for humans every day quickly appeared in ordinary households, and the number of laundry women also dropped significantly.
The same applies to all new technologies. The polishing of technology, the matching of mechanisms, and the cost of use all make many new technologies unable to immediately exert their expected power in the workplace. The technology of automatic telephones appeared in 1892, but the profession of telephone operator completely withdrew from the historical stage until after 1980, and it took nearly a century for new technology to replace labor; Today's seemingly white-collar jobs cannot leave the computer, in fact, from the emergence of personal computers to a significant impact on the workplace, it has also taken decades, and the biggest factor behind it is price.
Now it seems that artificial intelligence will set off huge waves, I am afraid that it will also have to go through the path of predecessors. ChatGPT, the fastest-growing consumer app of all time, is now reported to be experiencing sluggish growth. According to SimilarWeb, a web data analytics tool, the chat app's month-on-month growth rate has slowed from 131.6% in January to 2.8% in May.
In early June, Morgan Stanley released a large model usage survey report, showing that both OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard had less than 5% daily usage. Many people have used it once or twice and then never used it again. "At first, I felt so smart to chat with it, I can talk like a human, but I really have to work, my work is currently not able to do it, not only does not understand well, but also runs trains with its mouth full." A practitioner engaged in data analysis told The Paper.
So while the AI wave is on the rise, and while it may eventually reshape our work, in most jobs the process isn't as fast as you finish 4 years of study. Instead of struggling with which major to choose will not be robbed by AI, what we should grasp is to polish those abilities that AI cannot make up.
So what capabilities cannot be replaced by AI, at least in the short term? Through the analysis of 2017 work activities, we concluded that in addition to the work to be started, the least good thing AI is at currently interacting with people, which includes both daily communication and coordination, as well as management. And what AI is best at is processing large amounts of information and data.
Therefore, even if AI has passed the accounting exam, people in this industry are still not very worried: "Accounting audit cannot disappear for the time being, accounting audit most of the time is not making decisions, but doing manual work, communication and coordination investigations, etc." ”