How to Think About AI in the Workforce

By: NewsUSA

June 06, 2023 at 11:37 AM EDT

(NewsUSA) - As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes entrenched in many businesses, people are talking about what AI means for the workforce.

Ramsay Brown, CEO of Mission Control, a machine learning governance platform for accelerating quality velocity and trust in artificial intelligence, shared some ideas with the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), a bipartisan nonprofit organization, in a podcast.

Some of his key points are summarized here.

Brown’s company has coined the term “synthetic labor” to describe a way to think about AI in the workforce. In the near future, tools such as ChatGPT will go from being assistants to being more directly involved in business processes, Brown explained.

As AI shifts from being a tool to being a laborer, AI in different companies may take on names, AI-generated faces, and “a variety of competencies that make them more like a labor force and less like a tool like Microsoft Word or Google Sheets,” Brown said. “That shift of moving from AI as a tool to AI as a laborer capable of performing business tasks on its own is going to represent one of the most fundamental labor transformations in human history,” he added. “Our organization's goal is to build the ideas to help us navigate that with security and resilience and our values in life,” he said.

Ways in which AI has integrated into today’s workforce go beyond easily automated tasks such as flipping burgers or collecting trash:

- Support services. AI does not mean that a robot doctor will set your wrist in the hospital emergency room. Instead, “it's that every person that doctor used to rely on, such as administrators, accounts receivable clerks, and data analysists, will increasingly be intelligent software,” Brown said. Not all jobs will disappear, but prepare for extensive unemployment among those whose main job focus is support, such as using Microsoft Office, he cautioned.

- Creative codes. AI may be able to write a poem or symphony. However, there will always be “a place where we break something new out of the soul and the human spirit,” Brown said. “The problem is that most people are listening to top 40 music and top 40 is quite automatable. That's already mostly software and coding.”

“The evolution of AI into the workforce is not all doom and gloom,” Brown emphasized.

“Think of our greatest challenges, such as aging, or whether we can become a spacefaring civilization, and think of 100 million fresh minds trained in the state of the art to work on a problem nonstop,” he said. “That is the future; we are at the doorstep, and that is why organizations like mine and other people working on AI and artificial general intelligence are so excited about this.”

Visit scsp.ai for more information.