2023 can be seen as the year of AI—one where it feels that anything is possible with the power of artificial intelligence. This has led to one prominent statement “AI will take our jobs”. This is true, but not in the way people expect.

Building Bridges

Imagine you are in the position of needing people to cross a river. You have to determine if a bridge is a right solution and what type of bridge you want to build. On top of that, what is the most optimal place for it to go? Once that is done, you must plan the project to get the right people and resources to build the bridge.

The question is: out of all of this, what can AI replace?

Making a decision on if you need a bridge at all and where it should go is absolutely something you can do with an AI. You can feed millions of data points and train a bot to give you that answer.

But, physically constructing the bridge is tough, to make that case. How can a text-generating AI weld metal together? What use is an image-generating AI in laying down concrete? What does a stress-testing AI bot look like? Whilst it can be possible in the future to accomplish these things, you are gaining just £200K-300K of labour costs, about 4-5 Project Managers.

If your job involves being in meetings, looking at data on a laptop, and making decisions, then AI has you in its sights.

The Class War

Many people say the only war is a Class War, and my takeaway from the many conversations that AI will take our jobs only shows the socio-economic disparity in our society.

When we were developing physical robots to do certain jobs, the alarm bells never rang as loudly as they are now about AI.

We can comment that the automation now targets those in management, senior management, VP-level, executives, and even C-Level roles; we really have to worry. But it was just a story of progress when it was ordinary working people found their particular jobs on the line.