AI and your job

[2024horizons]

Anyone else slightly terrified?

I don't really want to disclose what I do but there's basically an AI website that would probably cut it down by about half. I'm torn between being terrified and running away from it and embracing it - but I'd have to teach myself how to use it as we don't exactly have time in the day job to learn it.

I kind of feel like it's do it, or lose out, as it's inevitably coming anyway. It's the weirdest feeling. My job is going to look completely different in ten years.

There is a large people/relationships element to my role which can’t be replaced by chat bots or whatever. I work in government and would love it if our systems and processes were sufficiently linked/developed to be able to be replaced by AI, but I suspect that is light years away. We’re only just going fully online for some external application portals.

While I recognise its varied uses, I find the whole prospect rather depressing.

Not a chance. LLM are utterly rubbish. They make shit up ... constantly. AI| is arguably better at creative imagination then the average human. But as for understanding math, cause & effect or priorities: no chance.

But what do all the admin support people do? Retrain?

I’m now looking at completely retraining at 52 which is something I didn’t really think I’d want to be doing at my age. And all so AI can take over or do my job.

What’s interesting is I had lunch with a small busimess owner today. She says she likes ChatGPT for drafting reports, documents which would otherwise take her a long time and she also employs a PA.

She did say (this is relevant to her job) that where AI falls down is emotive soul searching language (not quite what she used) but eg a blog she wrote which is personal to her, she said AI can’t do that.

I am honestly wondering at the quality of her reports. Chat GPT have been pretty awful whenever I tried to use it.

You mean my friend? She says they’re good with it. But I don’t know how good, what she uses them for and what’s her acceptable standard.

I don’t like ChatGPT when I’ve used it but most EA/PA friends love it so I’m a lone wolf in disliking it.

I'm regurgitating training, but the way to think of ChatGPT is like a pen or a paintbrush, just like having a pen or a paintbrush isn't going to make you a Pulitzer Prize winning writer or a Tate Gallery worth artist. It's how you use the tool that matters. It's called prompt engineering, and you need to learn how to do it to make the best use out of Chat GPT. Most people are novices at this stage, but we'll get better, and some will be much better than others.

I apologise for sounding like a LinkedIn twat...

There are already none of the old style admin jobs left in my (finance team) world. The people I knew who were doing those roles have already moved sideways. It wasn’t AI that did this but modern communication tools (email meaning there’s no phone calls to answer or letters to open…apart from HMRC but that’s another story). Not something that pleases me but it’s already happened…

Ain't no AI gonna clean a toilet ...

I need to get better at using it i think.

I do admin and write a lot of minutes which sounds perfect for AI, but i find it doesnt really know what was important and what was guff.

I find it useful if i have a bit of a mental block and just need a start point.

So if I can use AI to eg draft an agenda for an ‘away day’ that I then tweak I’m all for it.

But can AI soothe Julie's hurt feelings when her cherished item doesn't make the agenda; and flatter Mike into leading on the ultra-sensitive item no one else will touch with a barge-pole?

Why would you need AI to draft an agenda for a template away day?
Anyone with experience of organising away days knows you start with what you want to achieve - the actual outcomes. And they should be specific to your organisation and staff. If you want to do one of those shit corporate away days that could be run for any organisation then go ahead, but they are always a total waste of time.

In my profession the companies are trying to push AI. The Only workers who find it useful are people very new to the job. Anyone with any experience finds it a waste of time.

@Spendonsend I totally agree about minutes. Taking minutes you need to know the organisation and subject and know what is important to note down.

Hmm, my team are fairly behind tech wise and would be really slow to adopt any kind of AI improvements

Also, the actual content of what we do can't really be done by AI - too many variables (thank God)

If you want to cheer yourself up look up the "If HAL was Alexa" clip on YouTube.

Yes, AI will change our world and jobs, but so did the Smartphone, Internet, telephone and printing press. Just to name a few.

I've used it both for blog posts and for doing agendas for away days.

For blog posts it's more a matter of putting in bullet points and then getting it turned into a fully formed blog post rather than starting from scratch, so a lot of it is your content and original thought but you don't need to think about crafting the writing. it definitely saves me time. Sometimes I have to re-prompt it to re-write because I don't like the style but again that doesn't take very long.

For away days I use it more as a thinking partner, I ask it questions and it gives me suggestions of different activities that I can do to meet particular outcomes and it will also timetable everything for me. As I am someone who generally thinks things through by talking them out, I find it really helpful.

At the end of the day, AI is still just maths and coded logic, without empathy

There are studies showing patients rating AI responses as more empathetic than GPs

Empathetic responses can be learnt. There are people with impaired empathy who learn how to do this.

There are already jobs that have disappeared due to AI.

AI will take over middle class jobs. It’s when the middle classes feel threatened that revolutions happen. It’ll be ‘interesting’ to see how this plays out. One academic I heard said we know the risks of climate change, but we don’t know what the risks of AI might be. It’s a great unknown.

Having said that, there are bits of my job I would love AI to take over! Bits that are slow and laborious for me.

I heard one tech mogul (can't remember which one) say that 'AI won't take your job, but the person using AI will'.

I heard a talk recently about advances in some scientific areas, which had a quote 'chemistry won't be done by AI, it will be done by chemists who can use AI'. (And, in the lab, by robots. That's already taking out some of the nasty drudge work.)
I'm in the business of helping create software, but if I was doing research I'd rather spend my time on thinking what questions to ask and then what the results mean rather than on laborious lab work or tedious calculations.

Embrace it!!!
I am a teacher and the current education system is a dinosaur relic from Victorian times and is unfit for purpose now. I teach languages and love Ai -I can produce excellent resources with a couple of clicks that would be laborious and complete waste of time to slave over. Yes there needs to be a sanity check on the output but that is a minor time requirement.
A lot if what teachers go could be better delivered by AI. As others have said -with every technological advance jobs become obsolete but new opportunities created.
We had a crazy system this week doing the GCSEspeaking tests, involving shuffling physical cards which had to be sorted to deliver in a particular order, while fiddling with manual recording devices and a timing device and having to mark them at the same time -completely inefficient. Could have been far better managed with a pupil in headphones and all controlled by aAI. For this who say it ‘needs the human element of a real teacher doing it -it really doesn’t. And I am an old teacher too, but can’t stand the ‘it’s always been fine this way brigade’.

I'm a software developer working in this space and I think this quote from a PP is most accurate:

I heard one tech mogul (can't remember which one) say that 'AI won't take your job, but the person using AI will'.

Agree but remember that doesn't necessarily mean you as an individual can just start using AI and being fine. You'll need to be in a company and a team that is on the cutting edge of using AI. When it comes to knowledge work these are the ones that are going to win. Venture Capital money is now piling into companies who can replicate existing services at a fraction of the speed and cost using AI. We're only just at the beginning.

Also for those saying "ChatGPT is rubbish" - we're only on ChatGPT 4! The speed of improvement of LLMs is insane. We've seen nothing yet.

I'm glad I started this conversation as it's really helpful, just in terms of where to start with some basics and videos on You Tube.

I like Grammarly (is that even AI?), it shortened how long it took me to write and helped improve my language.

This is a good place to start: grow.google/intl/uk/
Lots of free online tutorials, and some low-cost online courses for specific digital skills. It's obviously all based on the Google platform, but some great resources to get you going.