Do Advancements in AI put Tech Jobs under Threat?

Ever since the launch of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, the fear of future job displacement has been ever so more prevalent in society. These fears are especially prevalent amongst those in the tech industry due to ChatGPT being concerningly good at programming. Additionally, ChatGPT recently launched code interpreter tool demonstrates that ChatGPT has huge potential to be extremely good at Data Analysis not too far in the future. Therefore, should people, who are interested in entering the tech industry or people currently new to the tech industry, be worried about job availability in the future?

The Concern

While many people may accept that AI assistants such as ChatGPT may not be able to fully replace and automate the role of a programmer, the primary concern is that it will massively increase productivity in workers. The primary argument is then that worker productivity increase will translate to jobs lost, since one employee may be able to do multiple employees of work. While I do agree that these AI assistants will massively increase employee productivity, I do dispute that this will lead to job displacement in tech.

Tech Adoption Time

Firstly, it will take some time until this technology is adopted into the tech industry on a large scale. This is mainly due to security concerns which has already led to companies such as Apple, Amazon, Samsung, Accenture, Version, etc. to restrict employees from using ChatGPT. According to Taylor Telford and Pranshu Verma from the Washington Post, this is due to corporate leaders being afraid of employees exposing proprietary code or information to the Chatbot, since ChatGPT will use that information to retrain the model again in the future. The corporate leaders then fear that a competitor might prompt the chatbot for their secretes in the future. Corporate leaders are also having cybersecurity concerns, since secretive information can be exposed if employees accounts get hacked.

While this AI ban will only be temporary for many companies, since many companies are building their own personalized Chatbot, it will be much more long term for others due to not all companies having the money to build one. Therefore, in many companies, traditional tech jobs will remain in around the same supply for a long amount of time.

Increased Supply of Work

While many companies won’t adapt the technology for a long amount of time there are many that already have and many that will relatively soon. Google released Google Bard in March 2023 and Microsoft released Bing AI in May 2023, while Amazon are currently trying to create their own Chatbot as well. Does this mean that these massive tech companies will offer much less jobs than before? Well not necessarily.

While one discussed outcome of employees being more productive is job reduction, another outcome can be increased supply of work. With being able complete projects faster, employees will have more time to take on more projects than they normally would. AI will also create some project opportunities as it allows employees to enhance their products in ways, they wouldn’t be able to in the past.

New Jobs Created

Just like with the Industrial Revolution, AI advancements will destroy some jobs but will create others. One main job it will create is ethical jobs, since AI bias can be a big issue when new AI systems are created. Therefore, there needs to be ethics team created in order to make sure this doesn’t happen. There will also be AI Engineer jobs created since advancements in AI will lead to many new AI systems being created to solve certain problems. Overall, just like the industrial revolution AI will lead to some jobs lost and some jobs created.

Conclusion

Overall, although there might be some change in the job landscape, tech jobs will still exist in high quantity. However, despite that it is still always important to monitor advances in AI and understand their overlying impacts.