The AI industrial revolution puts middle-class workers under threat this time
The machines are coming and they will eat your job. That’s been a familiar refrain down the years, stretching back to the Luddites in the early 19th century. In the past, step-changes in technology have replaced low-paid jobs with a greater number of higher-paid jobs. This time, with the arrival of artificial intelligence, there are those who think it will be different.
Politicians know that even in the best case AI will cause massive disruption to labour markets, but they are fooling themselves if they think they have years to come up with a suitable response. As the tech entrepreneur Mihir Shukla said at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos: “People keep saying AI is coming but it is already here.”
Developments in machine learning and robotics have been moving on rapidly while the world has been preoccupied by the pandemic, inflation and war. AI stands to be to the fourth industrial revolution what the spinning jenny and the steam engine were to the first in the 18th century: a transformative technology that will fundamentally reshape economies.
Change will not happen overnight but, as was the case in previous industrial revolutions, it will be painful for those affected, as millions of workers will be. Previously, machines replaced manual labour, leaving jobs that required cognitive skills to humans. Advances in AI – symbolised by ChatGPT – shows that machines can now have a decent stab at doing the creative stuff as well.
ChatGPT is a machine that can write intelligently. Asked to come up with a version of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address in the style of Donald Trump, it will search the web for suitable source material and generate original content.
Launched by the San Francisco-based research laboratory OpenAI in
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