JT & Dale Talk Jobs: Is AI coming for all our jobs?

Dear J.T. & Dale: Everyone is saying the economy is going to get bad and jobs will be tough. I hear AI is going to wipe out a lot of good-paying jobs, too. How worried should I be? — Josh

J.T.: There is a lot of discussion around the economy being tough, but most are saying that it will be temporary — maybe 18 to 24 months. As for AI, yes, I do believe that it’s going to disrupt a lot of positions and eliminate a lot of good-paying jobs. The hope is that there are new jobs being created that become in high demand. My advice is to stay on top of the trends and subscribe to resources that can help you learn about new career opportunities that are emerging as a result of technology like AI.

DALE: I’ve been playing around with the new AI tools, and I asked Bard — that’s Google’s version of AI — this question: Is AI going to take my job? Here’s a part of the response: It is possible that AI will take your job in the future, but it is not guaranteed. AI is becoming increasingly capable of automating tasks that were once done by humans, and this trend is likely to continue. However, AI is not capable of replacing all human jobs. Some jobs, such as those that require creativity, empathy, or social skills, will likely remain in the hands of humans for the foreseeable future.

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As you’ve probably heard, Wendy’s is planning on using it for taking drive-thru orders. That’s an ideal use — it figures out what you want and puts it into the system. And AI has a lot of obvious advantages, like working 24/7. Plus, it will work all those hours in a lot of different languages. I just asked Bard how many languages it knows: 265, it said. That doesn’t seem possible. So, I asked it how many languages there are in the world, and it tells me 7,139. Can that be right? I thought I’d Google it, but Bard is Google. The upshot is that we’ve had just about all the information in the world already online, and now we have a sentence-writing and sentence-speaking machine to spew it back. So, the idea is to make sure your job is more than that, more than repeating information. Think of how robots took over so many manual labor jobs, the repetitive ones. It’s like that with language jobs.