The most trending example of “generative AI”, the ChatGPT, may become a nightmare for the global employment market, says the US-based multinational investment bank Goldman Sachs.
There’s no need to mention the significant difference the artificial intelligence (AI) based software and hardware offer, especially in heavy industry, compared to human workers. Eventually, while the rise of AI would offer great benefits for businesses in terms of productivity and revenue, it is causing great worry for the employment market and pushing the creation of new occupations.
As the ChatGPT storm is going all around us these days, many recent publications and research are discussing whether the rise of AI is an opportunity or a threat. According to World Economic Forum (WEF), ChatGPT is only the beginning of life-shaping technologies that we will see in future. On the other hand, Goldman Sachs warns against an employment crisis because of the disruptor technology, which can turn a description into an image or write a thesis with unique sentences.
Generative AI can write texts or draw images according to the information input of a user. ChatGPT, the trending topic of the day, was released by a US-based private AI research lab in November 2022. The highly successful chatbot managed to draw all the attention recently while inspiring many tech companies to build their own AI systems:
- Microsoft Bing search engine can answer complicated questions through the ChatGPT upgrade,
- Privacy-based search engine DuckDuckGo now uses ChatGPT-assisted ‘DuckAssist’ to answer complicated questions in complete sentences.
- Slack, used for businesses for internal communication and organisation purposes, is planning to add ChatGPT to its office chat programme soon.
Millions to lose their jobs?
By assessing the potential capabilities ChatGPT promises for the future, Goldman Sachs analysed the global employment market, mainly the US and Europe, to get an estimate. The result says that the disruptive chatbot may eliminate 300 million full-time jobs.
The report, written by Joseph Briggs and Devesh Kodnani, underlines that two-thirds of all occupations are partially exposed to AI automation and that AI could handle a quarter of the total workload.
Recent research by Goldman Sachs and other institutions indicates that innovative AI tools threaten white-collar employees. According to another article published by Princeton, Pennsylvania, and New York universities, the jobs most affected by generative AI are legal services, while deploying this tech would boost business performance.
But why? One of the writers of this study, Manav Raj from Pennsylvania State University, told Business Insider that the legal services sector includes many small groups of occupations which are directly exposed to generative AI. On the other hand, does an intelligent chatbot have the potential to topple the global employment market? More than this question, we must emphasise the opportunities that would come with it. The cost of businesses would shrink significantly by deploying generative AI while leading to the creation of many new jobs, says Goldman Sachs. One of the newly emerged occupations is “prompt engineering”, representing people who test the capabilities of chatbots.
Lastly, researchers say the adaption of ChatGPT and similar innovative tech could increase the global GDP by around 7%.