Zain Jaffer is a real estate and property tech investor who sold his mobile ad startup Vungle in 2019 to private equity firm Blackstone.
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities strengthen in their ability to replicate higher level human tasks, there is realistic talk about job and business losses due to this. Mainstream media has started to cover and discuss this possibility, and a lot of companies and workers have been discussing this as a long term possibility.
Personally I do use AI to assist me in my normal tasks as an assistive tool. But I am still the one conceptualizing the work and doing most of it. It does help me in initial research for example, but I still need to search for real references.
Nothing wrong in using AI to assist you in your work. But just like any other work done with tools or other people, there is a point where you need to stop saying it is your work because you did not really do most of it. Where that point is, that is debatable and perhaps the subject of another article.
For creative work, it might become a near term replacement for many creators with the pace of AI capabilities growing day by day. The image and video generation of AI like Midjourney, Sora, and others are becoming extremely realistic and starting to be hard to distinguish between human generated work.
My thought is that at some point there may be a societal pushback against AI. People might explicitly ask if work has been done by human employees or creators, in the same way that supply chains are being scrutinized by customers for the absence of child labor and other objectionable practices. One way that can be done is through Proof of Humanity (PoH) cryptographically signed signatures on digital work, whether these be videos, images, text, and others.
Businesses and entrepreneurs who supply physical goods to customers and clients, such as those who make coffee, shampoo, toothpaste, furniture, cars, and others are not as threatened even if robotics could replace part of their work. This is because fully automated factories with robots are still expensive, and humans are still needed to oversee even those factories. The era of the totally “lights out” factory, which might exist in some place somewhere, is not really practical at the moment.
However those in the service industries, such as call/contact centers, freelance writers, illustrators, and the like who work using the Internet, and whose work outputs are generally digital (not physical) are most at risk of losing their jobs with AI. Offshore call center destinations such as the Philippines and even some onshore ones here in the US, see this replacement happening as a matter of course.
Personally I feel that although AI does not need to take a rest, take vacation or sick leaves, or slack off, does not really take the initiative to do other things that may be needed but are not in the person’s normal scope of work. For example, if an employee suddenly needs to grab a fire extinguisher to stop a fire in the Company premises, it does not really matter if their normal job is to ba an accountant or engineer. They have the Company’s best interests in mind.
An AI does what it is told to do. Nothing else. For now, it cannot suddenly react to do other things in the best interests of its employer.
The way to avoid losing your business to AI is to strengthen your brand. That personal or corporate brand should include the customer’s perception that you are there to serve their needs and interests and have their back at the right costs, as opposed to an AI that may not care about them.