The American workers who have had their careers upended by automation in recent decades have largely been less educated, especially men working in manufacturing.

But the new kind of automation — artificial intelligence systems called large language models, like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard — is changing that. These tools can rapidly process and synthesize information and generate new content. The jobs most exposed to automation now are office jobs, those that require more cognitive skills, creativity and high levels of education. The workers affected are likelier to be highly paid, and slightly likelier to be women, a variety of research has found.

“It’s surprised most people, including me,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered A.I., who had predicted that creativity and tech skills would insulate people from the effects of automation. “To be brutally honest, we had a hierarchy of things that technology could do, and we felt comfortable saying things like creative work, professional work, emotional intelligence would be hard for machines to ever do. Now that’s all been upended.”

A range of new research has analyzed the tasks of American workers, using the Labor Department’s O*Net database, and hypothesized which of them large language models could do. It has found these models could significantly help with tasks in one-fifth to one-quarter of occupations. In a majority of jobs, the models could do some of the tasks, found the analyses, including from Pew Research Center and Goldman Sachs.

For now, the models still sometimes produce incorrect information, and are more likely to assist workers than replace them, said Pamela Mishkin and Tyna Eloundou, researchers at OpenAI, the company and research lab behind ChatGPT. They did a similar study, analyzing the 19,265 tasks done in 923 occupations, and found that large language models could do some of the tasks that 80 percent of American workers do.

  • Hellfire103
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    4910 months ago

    In an ideal world, this would be a good thing. Machines doing the work so humans can relax; but I doubt this is even possible in the world we live in.

    • Ignotum
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      2910 months ago

      Like always it will make it so 1% can relax and live even more comfortably, while 99% is left in the dirt

    • @Shadywack@lemmy.world
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      1910 months ago

      For the sake of stating the obvious, machines doing the work so that the rich can widen the wealth gap and screw more of us over. That’s what’s going to happen here. Even richer rich people, with less people able to afford housing and healthcare.

      • Aussiemandeus
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        1010 months ago

        In the good parts of the world you don’t need to afford health care.

        In the bad parts of the world you do.

    • @ButtholeSpiders@startrek.website
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      910 months ago

      You are correct, the higher ups will screw the lower class until the last second on the clock, forever in denial they’re doing anything wrong. And, they’ll eventually get hit by it, but not until the poor are bashing down their doors for all the figurative cake they’ve been hoarding.