In this article, we will take a look at the 16 jobs that will disappear in the future due to AI. To see more such jobs, go directly to 5 Jobs That Will Disappear in the Future Due to AI.
By now you must have heard or read about how AI-powered bots are coming for millions of jobs. Whether or not they will make all of us redundant and how our collective future would be shaped by this development is a separate debate. But it’s important to note that companies have already started using AI technologies to assist, and in some cases replace, humans. Take multinational home repair services company HomeServe, for example. The company recently deployed AI-powered bot named “Charlie” at its call center. According to a detailed report by the Wall Street Journal, the assistant takes a whopping 11,400 calls a day, which is impossible for any human. The AI agent also assists human staff in their daily work, schedules repair appointments, processes claims, among a plethora of other tasks.
Call centers is just one area where AI has arrived to make a difference. Earlier this year a report by Goldman Sachs made a lot of rounds in the media. The report said that automation could affect about 300 million full-time jobs in the US. The threat of AI taking over human jobs jumped exponentially after companies like Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), Alphabet Inc Class A (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT) started to aggressively roll out AI applications.
While the fear about AI taking away jobs isn’t unfounded, it’s vastly blown out of proportion due to lack of historical context. A research paper titled Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? by David H. Autor shares some interesting insights into how human history has always seen jobs come and go. Humans over the course of history have shown a dramatic capability of adaptation or evolution. Consider the fact that 41% of workforce in the US was employed in the agriculture sector in 1900. That percentage fell to just 2% by 2000. This massive change was ushered in by automated machinery in the agriculture sector. What happened to these millions of workers? They didn’t starve to death, but evolved and probably thrived thanks to the new kinds of jobs created in the aftermath of the technological revolution.
Another important data point shared in the research paper shows how automation creates new jobs and actually ends up increasing the productivity of humans, benefitting everyone. The research says that ATM machines were first launched in the 1970s and their numbers in the US economy quadrupled from approximately 100,000 to 400,000 between 1995 and 2010. And what happened to human bank tellers? They actually rose from 500,000 to approximately 550,000 over the 30-year period from 1980 to 2010. Population increase was one of the reasons behind this growth but the most important thing to note here is that after the automation of cash handling, banks started to use bank teller staff in other, more important banking tasks (like customer relationship management).
The Goldman Sachs report we talked about earlier in the article also cited the research paper by Autor and says that AI could end up creating new jobs and opportunities.
“In addition, jobs displaced by automation have historically been offset by the creation of new jobs, and the emergence of new occupations following technological innovations accounts for the vast majority of long-run employment growth, according to the report. For example, information-technology innovations introduced new occupations such as webpage designers, software developers and digital marketing professionals. There were also follow-on effects of that job creation, as the boost to aggregate income indirectly drove demand for service sector workers in industries like healthcare, education and food services. "
A research paper titled Demography as a Driver of Robonomics by Robonomics sums up its study in a paragraph that sounds eerily accurate and unsettling:
The demographic changes are a driver for how governments, industry, and the ci tizenry will have to convert into a more robotized economy. A shortage of humans means that people will have to be replaced with technology, indeed research shows that middle -aged workers are already being replaced by robots in the USA. While there will be winners and losers from this transition, there will be externalities within countries and a change in international relations. The transition to a robonomic society will not be without turbulence, so humanity (and our robots) will have to be brave or at least be programmed to appear brave for the new world we are entering into. May the robotic force be with us all!
Our Methodology
For this article we consulted several research papers, scholarly articles, reliable internet articles and book summaries to shortlist the jobs that face the threat of extinction over the next five to ten years due to AI. These research papers include GPTs are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of Large Language Models by OpenAI and University of Pennsylvania, Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4 by Microsoft Research, Goldman Sachs’ March 2023 report titled The Potentially Large Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Economic Growth, The Future of Employment paper by Oxford Martin School, a research paper titled How will Language Modelers like ChatGPT Affect Occupations and Industries? by researchers from University of Pennsylvania, New York University and Princeton, among other academic papers. We also consulted the website Will Robots Take My Job? The rationale behind consulting a wide range of sources was to expand our methodology and reach a consensus opinion-based ranking, minimizing biases that come with relying on a single source.
ChatGPT is already being used to make plugins and micro-services based on user requirements and input. It’s not hard to believe that fifty years down the road a user would be able to just tell their AI assistant about a website they want to be made for their business and AI would make it for them in just a few minutes (or seconds?). AI-based software would also be able to perform data analysis tasks, making data analysts redundant. Technologies offered by Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), Alphabet Inc Class A (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT) will play a key role in this development.
By now it’s clear to anyone who’s used ChatGPT that it’s a great tool for basic writing tasks and proofreading. Writing tasks that do not involve any deep research, human perspective or in-depth analysis could easily be taken away by AI in the years to come.
Several online demos have shown that ChatGPT does a far better job at translation when compared to Google Translate. As companies race to improve their language models and train their systems on foreign languages, the requirement for entry-level translators will decline.
Tools like DALL.E and MidJourney are already causing a lot of layoffs in the graphic design industry since businesses can simply give input to these AI tools and make basic graphics and logos.
Thousands of fast food restaurants around the world are already using automated machines to take customer orders. But the need for human interaction is really felt in drive-thrus, where the customer thinks, talks, and explains their orders (and sometimes makes a lot of changes). But large language models have enabled companies to start thinking of bringing AI to the drive-thru as well. Wendy’s recently revealed plans to launch AI-powered drive-thrus where bots will take customer orders. The company plans to launch the service at its locations in Columbus, Ohio. The company’s chief executive Todd Penegor reportedly said:
“You won’t know you’re talking to anybody but an employee.”
Basic accounting, bookkeeping and payroll processing usually involve some straightforward processes based on user input. That’s why a lot of research papers and studies we read during our research assign a higher risk to accounting jobs when it comes to AI.
Millions of people receive their packages on time daily due to postal service clerks. They are the ones who make sure packages are entered in the system with correct stamps and addresses, in addition to taking money orders, helping customers fill out forms, placing mail in the correct pigeon holes of mail racks or in bags, among many other tasks. But several sources we read for our research, including the research paper by researchers at Princeton and University of Pennsylvania, believe postal service clerk roles could be automated in the future.
Companies are already using AI-powered systems that fetch, process, enter, format and communicate data based on user requirements. Data entry clerks were already facing redundancy throughout the world due to advanced web scraping technologies and python-based data processing scripts.
Bank tellers perform basic and important tasks like verifying a customer’s identity and financial information before processing transactions, cashing checks, collecting loan payments, etc. Almost all the reliable resources we consulted during our research believe bank teller roles have a 100% chance of disappearing in the future because of AI. But seeing bank tellers on this list should not be a surprise to anyone. Several banks started using automated tellers long before ChatGPT. In 2017, the Bureau of Labor Statistics had forecasted that teller jobs would decline around 8 percent through 2026.
Scheduling meetings, preparing documents, searching documents, applying basic excel formulas to retrieve data, booking flights and hotels, calling/messaging for important questions and follow-ups. These are some of the tasks performed by administrative support staff and many of these could easily be performed by AI. In fact a lot of companies have already started using ChatGPT for scheduling, taking meeting notes, booking appointments, etc.
There’s a lot more to law industry than just the lawyers who are standing in the courtroom indulged in deep arguments. Several research papers and studies believe jobs in the legal industry are facing a high risk of redundancy due to AI. Consider what a legal assistant does. They manually search tons of legal documents to find an answer, make appointments, perform client coordination and general admin tasks. All of this could easily be automated.
As AI technologies offered by companies like Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), Alphabet Inc Class A (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT) improve, more and more jobs will face increased exposure to automation.
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Disclosure: None. 16 Jobs That Will Disappear in the Future Due to AI is originally published on Insider Monkey.
