For many Americans, AI quickly changes our way of working.
An increasing number of workers now use AI in their work with a certain frequency. According to a Recent survey Gallup40% of American workers say that they use AI at work at least a few times a year, and 19% of workers use it several times a week. The two statistics have almost doubled since last year, against 21% and 11%, respectively.
At the same time, more than half of American workers are concerned about the impact of AI Pew Research Center Survey. Their fears have merit: a World Economic Forum report Posted in January revealed that 48% of American employers plan to reduce their workforce due to AI.
Naturally, the rapid growth of AI at the workplace has raised many questions. How will the AI be reshaping our jobs? What new skills should we develop? What industries will be the most affected by AI?
These questions have no easy answers, explains Ethan Mollick, associate professor in Wharton and author of “Co-intelligence: living and working with AI.”
Mollick, who is also co -director of Wharton AI generative laboratoriesis well aware of the concerns of the replacement of human jobs.
“The idea you could simply submit to AI for people seems naive to me,” he said. However, as AI continues to improve, “there can be effects” for workers, he said.
Here is what Mollick has to say about AI and the future of work.
CNBC Make IT: There are a lot of concerns about the replacement AI of human jobs, including large forecasts of managers such as Bill Gates. What is your opinion about it?
AI agents are not yet there. At present, AI is good in certain things, bad in certain things, but it does not replace human jobs, overall.
It does certain things quite well, but the objective of the laboratories is [to create] Fully autonomous agents and machines more intelligent than humans in the next 3 years. Do we know they can get there? We don’t do it, but it’s their bet. This is what they are targeting. They wait and aim for mass unemployment. This is what they continue to tell us to prepare us.
As for believing them or not, we just don’t know, right? You have to take it as at least a possibility, but we are not there yet either. A large part is also the choice of organizational leaders who decide how these systems are really used, and organizational change is slower than all laboratories and technology technologies.
Most of the time, technology creates new jobs. It is also possible. We just don’t know the answer.
As the use of AI becomes more widespread, what skills should we develop on the job market?
If you asked questions about AI skills a year ago, I would have said incited skills. This is no longer so important. We have done a lot of research, and it turns out that the prompts do not matter as they did.
So, you know, what does that leave us? Well, judgment, taste, deep experience and knowledge. But you have to build them in some respects despite the AI, rather than with their help.
Having curiosity and the agency also helps, but these are not really skills. I don’t think the use of AI will be the difficult thing for most people.
What is the “difficult thing”, then?
I think it develops sufficient expertise to be able to supervise these systems.
Expertise is acquired by learning, which means doing a job of level [tasks that current AI models can do easily] Again and again, so you learn to do something good. Why would anyone do that again? And it becomes a real challenge. We must understand how to resolve this with a mixture of education and training.
How do you think AI will affect the entry-level labor market?
I think people jump to the conclusion that [AI is] Why we see young people unemployment. I don’t think it’s still the problem, but I think it’s a huge concern.
Companies will have to see the levels of entry in certain respects, not only to do work, but as a chance to bring people who will become senior employees, and to train them to be thus, which is very different from the way they have seen work before.
Are your students concerned about the impact of AI on jobs?
I think everyone care about it, right? Council and banks, analysts’ roles and marketing roles – these are all jobs affected by AI. The more you are educated, the more strongly you are paid, the more your work overlaps with AI.
So I think everyone is very worried and I have no easy answers for them. The advice that I tend to give to people is to choose jobs that have as many “group” tasks as possible.
Think of doctors. You have a job where someone is supposed to be good in empathy and [surgical] manual skills And the diagnosis and be able to manage an office and follow the last side of the research. If AI helps you with some of these things, it is not a disaster.
If AI can make one or two of these things better than you, it does not destroy your work, it changes what you do, and I hope it allows you to focus on the things you like the most.
Grouped work is therefore more likely to be flexible than single wire work.
How could the adoption of AI take place in the workplace?
For me, the problem is that these tools are not really built as productivity tools. They are built like chatbots, so they work very well at the individual level, but this does not translate very easily into something that can be turned off throughout the team.
People always discover how to operate with these things as teams. Do you bring it to each meeting and ask yourself the questions of AI in the middle of each meeting? Does everyone have their own AI campaign to whom they talk to?
The room on which I continue to make a big problem is that it is unfair to ask employees to understand it. I see leadership and organizations say it is urgent to use AI, people will be dismissed without it, then they have no articulation about what the future looks like.
I want to hammer this point at home, which is, without articulating a vision, where are we going? And it’s the missing piece. It is not only up to everyone to understand it.
University instructors and professors must play an active role in training how AI is used. Organization leaders must play an active role in training how AI is used. It cannot be simply: “Everyone discovers it and the magic will happen”.
This interview was condensed and published for more clarity.
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