Our Mission
This Blog will focus on areas most important for students in grades 8 – 12 to understand about how jobs and businesses will change and how they can start preparing themselves, so they are able to take advantage these evolving career opportunities. We also want them to not be afraid of the technology. While AI and ML will eliminate some jobs, they will also help create others we have never imagined, a predictable consequence of any major new technology throughout economic history. For example, when horse drawn transportation was replaced by the car it created automobile assembly plants, car service jobs and the growth of the petroleum industry that in combination rapidly accelerated the growth of the American economy. The introduction of personal computing eliminated over 3 million jobs, and then created enormous industries with the introduction of the internet, cell phones,
cloud computing that has led to AI and ML.
We also want to help young entrepreneurs understand how to use AI and ML to innovate and better manage their own businesses so they will be able to compete in this rapidly changing, technology-driven world.
Join Us
We welcome contributions from thought leaders, educators, and industry professionals to enrich our content and provide a comprehensive understanding of AI's impact. Together, we can equip the next generation with the tools and knowledge they need to thrive in a technology-driven world.
AI and Machine Learning: Transforming Careers and Industries
Before Chat GPT was introduced in late 2022, many believed that AI's primary role would be enhancing robotics for repetitive task jobs in manufacturing, warehousing, restaurants, and construction. However, the combination of AI and ML is expected to have an even more profound impact on white-collar jobs, particularly entry-level positions such as coding, low-level programming, translation, customer service, and research during the first few years of its introduction.
This realization caused many tech leaders to sound the alarm that AI and ML would result in the elimination of so many jobs there would be the need for a guaranteed minimum income from the government. While it is obvious some job categories will be eliminated, both demographic trends that are reducing the number of people in labor force and the current lack of electrical generation and grid capacity needed for the kind of growth in Ai and ML in these dire projections would require huge investments in electrical generation and transmission capacity. There are also labor shortages in many fields where employers will retrain employees and not eliminate jobs to make them more productive as a response to labor shortages. We are also seeing AI and ML being used by entrepreneurs to create new businesses and new job categories.
While it is difficult to accurately predict the net job loss or gain from AI and ML, we can identify careers that certainly will be positively and negatively affected by AI and ML in the next ten years and make sure young people get that information so they can make a good career choice.
The Four Major Factors Affecting the Pace of the Adoption of AI and ML
We believe people deciding on future careers need to understand these four key economic variables that will drive the pace of the adoption of AI and ML as they consider their career paths:
1. We want to provide information about the obvious job categories where people will be replaced. The most recognizes are replacing people with robots in manufacturing, warehousing, restaurants and building construction. But now there are programs that use AI and ML to create software bots adept at pattern recognition, which means like robots replacing people on assembly lines and in warehouses, these software bots can apply the same solution to data problems. Examples include white collar jobs doing repetitive math calculations like computer coding, many accounting functions, translation, and library research that will be the easiest to automate, even easier than smart robots in jobs that require physical repetition on assembly lines, warehouses, restaurants and construction that only a few years ago were thought the most vulnerable to AI and robotics.
2. There are several factors that will limit too rapid adoption of AI and ML in the workplace. The technology needs large amounts of electricity to run the server farms that store and process the vast amounts of data on which AI and ML depend and will be coming online at the same time as demand from EV charging is expected to grow. Both are up against in the need to reduce the use of fossil fuels to combat global warming. Plus, the electrical grid in the US is aging and needs significant new investment if it is going to be able to transport what is expected to be a 30% increase in electricity demand from these two sources. Bill Gates recognizes this problem and has formed a company to build smaller,safer nuclear reactors that can be place close to a server farm. While that is a promising solution long term, his first reactor won’t be finished and tested for eight years.
3. The world population is decreasing, particularly in the more developed countries expected to be in the forefront of applying AI and ML This included countries in Asia like Korea and Japan and also China that has run out of cheap labor as they are seeing the effect of their one child policy. The US population is only expected to grow at .3% each year on average between now and 2050. That number include maintaining immigration levels. Without immigration, the US population would decline. World demographic treads are important because in the past, population growth was one of the pillars of economic growth. Slowing population growth means the current population will need to become more productive and AI and ML can make that happen just like three major earlier technologies in economic history, the steam engine, electricity and digital commuting, accelerated economic growth as each made people more productive. AI and ML with produce the world’s fourth economic revolution.
4. There will be societal concerns about the adoption of AI and ML, including privacy, job loss and retraining, and trade off between the benefit of the new technology and the demand it will put on electricity generation that could slow down our transition to clean fuels and reduced carbon emissions.
I will be starting regular weekly Blog posts by the end of August and will also be posting articles on these four topics submitted by others. If you have material you would like us to add to our Blog, please sent it to wclangdon@4threvolution.org.
