Klaus Schwab, the World Economic Forum’s founder and chairman, warned that the Fourth Industrial Revolution will have a profound influence on our lives. Every sector would be digitalized and disintermediated, necessitating the development of new business models. Furthermore, due of the risk of job loss, employees would need to be quickly reskilled and upskilled.
Schwab was concerned about how quickly information, biology, and nanotechnology were developing and infiltrating more and more elements of our existence. Analysts anticipated that in five years, these trends will affect 50% of all occupations.
After five years, researchers have significantly misjudged the rate at which technology developments would alter how humans operate. We boosted our use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to enrich our work life and beyond without even thinking about it, thanks to advancements in smartphones, high-speed networks, and the Internet of Things.
We ask our personal digital helpers how to make Eggs Benedict for breakfast in the morning. Our refrigerators inform us of what we need to get at the grocery. When we leave the home, our vacuum robots clean the floors. We use our iPhones to find the shortest way to work. At work, grammar is checked by software in our reports, presentations, and emails.
Based on the constant stream of data that our organizations gather, software automatically analyzes and offers suggestions. When we go home, video streaming providers suggest movies that we will most likely appreciate. When we go to bed, our smartwatches track the duration and quality of our sleep. I could go on and on.
The year 2022 will be regarded as the year AI made substantial inroads into the knowledge sector. AI capabilities are now publicly accessible for two jobs that were previously reserved for humans: creative development of technical communications and presentation preparation.
Tome released its AI-powered narrative generator to the public in September, allowing anybody to instantly build a draft slide presentation on a selected subject, complete with text and supporting photos. I requested Tome to create a presentation on “Workplace Ethics Promotion.” It produced an eight-slide presentation titled “Ethics in the Workplace: A New Frontier” in less than a minute.
To be fair, it was a rough draft, but the text and photos were a good start – it would have taken me at least an hour to design and produce anything in slide style. I could deliver a presentation on themes I am acquainted with in two days by improving and personalizing Tome’s output. Tome may significantly boost my consulting output, since I generally allow two weeks of preparation when accepting speaking engagements under similar conditions.
ChatGPT, a publicly accessible natural language AI model that can converse conversationally and creatively on nearly any subject, was published by OpenAI in November. In 1994, I published my first column (also on technology – the World Wide Web). I’ve been writing columns since then, and even a brief item usually takes me at least a week to research and write. I requested ChatGPT to produce a piece on “Motivating the Gen Z Worker,” and it put out 600 words in immaculate English and convincing writing in only three clicks. Was it your own work? I copied and pasted phrases from the column into Google and found nothing similar. Allowing time for me to verify and adjust the column to my preferences would still result in a tenfold improvement in productivity!
“Write a nice letter rejecting a customer a refund for a product that was most likely damaged by the customer,” I instructed ChatGPT next. I typed up the letter in 15 seconds and felt it was wonderfully kind and professional.
While the AI examples above are impressive, they do pose certain concerns. To begin, if the usage of AI technologies is not mentioned, the user’s originality and integrity may be called into doubt. In the case of student usage, for example, this might result in a deluge of plagiarism — termed “AIgiarism” – allegations.
Furthermore, AI’s creativity and learning abilities are not comparable to those of humans. AI technologies generate replies by computationally recognizing statistical patterns in enormous quantities of digitized human inputs, mostly from the internet, and then combining these patterns in novel and supposedly human ways on demand. As a result, the data and mathematical techniques put into these technologies are constantly constrained. Finally, these technologies have been demonstrated to often cause mistakes that would go unnoticed by inexperienced users. As a result, depending only on them might be catastrophic.
In terms of office knowledge labor, the technology-enabled future envisaged by Schwab has already come. All employees must be aware of their limits and learn how to utilize the increasingly accessible AI technologies productively and responsibly. They have the ability to liberate us from the monotonous and data-intensive job that computers excel at. We may then concentrate on communicating with our clients and stakeholders in novel ways to actually enhance their lives.