How is AI slowly eating up white-collar jobs?

In the last decade, almost every argument putting forward the idea of artificial intelligence (AI) taking up white-collar jobs from humans was downplayed by critics with a rather simplistic counter — machines lack the creativity and intuition of a human worker.

In the last few years, however, this counter has fallen flat, with AI automating the economy in a much more subtle way than expected. Today, machines are not just deployed by businesses for manual labour. Enterprises are using AI-backed software for content writing, customer service, accounting and a host of other professional services.

For instance, Rytr, a popular AI copywriting app with 6,00,000 users, is helping businesses with text that is indistinguishable from human writing. Unlike content writers, this app doesn’t tire, doesn’t ask for payment and can generate an unlimited amount of content.

Similarly, AI-powered customer service is slowly taking over the market. In the United States, an estimated 85 percent of customer interaction is taking place with AI-backed tools. Given the brisk pace at which such tools are gaining popularity, there would be huge implications for nearly 3 million customer service representatives employed in the US.

Another such example is that of robo-translators. A 2020 research paper, published in the Nature journal, showed how deep learning systems outperform human translators. The wages and demand for human translators are certain to reduce as AI translation becomes more common.

The landscape has clearly changed. The businesses which don’t use AI tools are at a disadvantage. Their input cost is higher and their product (or services) is probably inferior to their counterparts who have deployed modern technologies.

While AI-backed technologies are a boon for nations like Japan where the workforce is ageing, they can lead to a massive disruption in countries like India, where millions of people enter the job market every year.

Nonetheless, AI eating up jobs is surely not new but a reality that we all have to come to terms with. Of course, there is this argument of new job avenues opening up with the rise of AI but the question is — are we prepared?