Humans’ fear of new technology is as old as time. Consider, for example, how Irish communities initially resisted electricity, fearing that they’d be electrocuted in their beds. Decades later, the advent of the Internet inspired similar anxieties, with many worrying about its potential negative impacts on their lives and careers.
The ensuing decades have since dismissed those fears as misguided. Yet another anxiety looms again with the debut of artificial intelligence in the mainstream.
The exponential growth of artificial intelligence has met with an equal measure of excitement and fear. For many, each new day unfolds like scenes from a science-fiction movie as AI-powered technology gains increasing sway over their lives.
Not surprisingly, a chief concern is the potential for AI to replace human jobs. The fear is widespread. Even the World Economic Forum (WEF) predicts that 92 million jobs will be supplanted by AI in five years to come.
Are these fears akin to the fears that accompanied the advent of the Internet?
Weeks into its launch in November 2022. ChatGPT, the intellectual brainchild of OpenAI, became the fastest-growing consumer Internet application in history. In the years since then, generative AI has broadened scope, from medicine to programming, evolving from a basic chatbot into a productivity tool. Today it is one of several existing models, alongside Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude and Microsoft’s Copilot.
The surge of new generative AI tools hints at the increasing practical use of AI technology in many different spheres today. Not only might students turn to it for solutions to thorny assignments, but also computer programmers might employ it when generating computer code.
A 2023 GitHub study showed that developers who deployed the GitHub Copilot generative AI coded up to 55% faster than those who didn’t.
The lightning-speed response of generative AI tools has been a major draw, saving time and improving productivity. Additionally, advancements in AI have introduced more human-like interactions, making these tools engaging and intuitive. Around the world today, more than 40% of companies reportedly deploy AI in their businesses. A greater proportion are skirting with the idea.
“Many of these companies abroad are even the ones pushing for these programs,” says Russell Emekoba, a Nigerian-based software developer. “What it has helped me do is, you know, very easily analyse issues, that would take me a lot of minutes, or half an hour or two, and discover what the problem is,” he adds, highlighting an increased productivity from using generative AI to review codes and test software programmes.
What does this portend for human programmers? In a podcast interview with Joe Rogan last year, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Meta, revealed that the company could soon begin to integrate artificial intelligence into some of its technical operations.
“We’ll get to the point where a lot of the code in our apps, including the AI that we generate, is actually going to be built by AI engineers, not people engineers,” he said.
Zuckerberg’s vision hints at an unprecedented wave of technological innovations engineered by AI. Already many social-media networks, among them Facebook and TikTok, leverage AI technology to probe their users’ behaviour and preferences for personalised ads.
Yet it raises big concerns about what the future of work might be with the rapid advancements in AI, as another software developer put it.
“Folks should take a hard look at their current role and evaluate if it will still be relevant in the next 5 to 10 years,” warns Eze Sunday of Librium Tech.
The integration of AI into human operations is “slightly complicated,” notes Emekoba, who expresses scepticism at the WEF’s recent projection. Yet he reckons “that there will be a significant decrease in hiring in the next couple of years.”
Perhaps the latest iteration in AI is the rise of AI agents, which embody a wider range of functionalities than generative AI. Where a chatbot responds to prompts, an AI agent makes decisions autonomously based on the information it perceives.
Nowadays, AI agents are employed in self-driving cars and as virtual assistants, where they use their sensors to control the vehicle and help in scheduling appointments, respectively.
Notwithstanding the rapid breakthroughs in AI, it isn’t all doom and gloom for human workers. As with the Internet, AI will open up a window of new roles and opportunities that humans can fill in. Around 170 million new roles will be created by 2030, according to the WEF. “Roles like AI instructor, AI engineer and others will become even more of a thing,” says Sunday.
Beyond the tech industry, AI holds promise in areas such as medicine, where it will be essential in diagnosis and developing drugs, with human supervision of course. Similarly, in agriculture, farmers will employ AI models to forecast crop yields and examine market trends.
Although the future likely points to a collaboration between AI-powered systems and humans, the event of a fully automated economy would lead to a “misanthropic dystopian end,” according to Luke Olaniyi, a public-affairs analyst. “In a world where humans have largely been replaced by AI and only a few people are employed, that creates a crisis of meaning,” he says.
The fear of new technology, such as electricity and the Internet, traditionally stems from concerns about its potential negative impacts. Today, a similar fear accompanies the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly the threat of job displacement. The World Economic Forum predicts that AI could replace 92 million jobs by 2030, and companies are increasingly adopting AI technologies. Tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot illustrate AI's potential to enhance productivity, performing tasks like code writing at a faster pace.
Despite fears, AI is ushering in new opportunities and roles, such as AI instructors and engineers. While AI automations, like AI agents in self-driving cars and virtual assistants, provide benefits, they also raise concerns about the future of work and societal implications. Yet, AI is also poised to revolutionize sectors like medicine and agriculture, promising improvements in diagnosis, drug development, and market predictions. Ultimately, while a balance between AI and human collaboration is expected, an excessively automated society poses existential risks, highlighting the importance of ensuring meaningful human roles in an AI-dominated world.
