AI will not replace human jobs, humans with AI will replace humans without AI
ChatGPT seems god-like. Humans take hours to do things it seems to do in seconds. Millions of posts indicate how thousands of human jobs will get automated. The AI automation apocalypse will make many of us redundant.
But AI is at its core only a very powerful tool made to enable humans
Cars reached places in minutes that took humans hours. Airplanes flew to places in hours that took human days. Calculators did computations in seconds that took humans minutes. Computers stored information in seconds that humans took years.
In the long arc of humanity, they only unlocked our potential further
At its core, AI is not any different from tools that humans have created throughout history. People have always been fearful of every new technology. But they forget the extent of human ingenuity. Our strength is our ability to adapt.
Importantly, AI today does not create, it simply generates
The underlying information that AI builds on is human. Put differently, large AI models are effectively trained on vast amounts of human history and creativity. It looks powerful because it is able to synthesize the intelligence of millions of humans in seconds. Unfortunately, it cannot create anything a human hasn’t thought of
But a single human is capable of original thought, which millions had not considered
AI will be used to automate a lot of “copy-paste” work. Code that is lifted from GitHub, content for e-commerce products, images that are stock photos. In fact, AI will be used for activities that people find mundane, boring, repetitive. Today, some people are needed to do this, tomorrow 1 person with an AI tool will do it
Inspiring, original, creative work will continue to be only done by humans
If you want to get ahead, learn how to use AI tools. But this isn’t true for today, it was true for tools 20 years ago, it will be true for tools 20 years later.
Only the tool changes.
Humans with tools beat humans without tools. Tools cannot beat humans. Originality, innovation and progress will always remain a human endeavor
We are after all a sentient machine trained over millions of years by the undisputed queen, Nature