AI is coming for your job

Artificial intelligence is coming for your job.

I know many of us must have heard the above sentence a lot, so much so that we hardly take cognizance of it. I have read several social, blog, and website posts in favor of and against this take. I have listened to several podcasts on the subject as well. They all made for an interesting read, but never for once did I think that I would be a direct victim of the AI evolution.

source

Since 2019, I have been working for a platform that provides educational services to high school and college students. I won't be able to disclose the identity of the platform due to a non-disclosure agreement. I would rather be jobless with peace than combine joblessness with a legal face-off. What does this platform offer its clients specifically?

They help students with their assignments. Students upload questions they find tough or problematic, and the platform employs the services of subject experts to answer these questions for them based on established and ever-changing guidelines. I worked as a subject matter expert in Biology, Chemistry, Health, and Physics. Occasionally, I ventured into other subjects such as Mathematics, English, and even Humanities.

For every college-level question answered, experts get paid 0.9 dollars and get 0.7 dollars for every high school-level question answered. That was how I started in 2019. About two years later, the rates were reviewed downward to 0.7 and 0.5 dollars, respectively. As if that wasn't enough, the divide between college and high school-level questions was removed about a year ago. Both categories of questions became 0.5 dollars flat rate.

Things were going on relatively smoothly until about three to four months ago when the volume of questions being provided by the IT team went down drastically. My initial thought was that the team was experiencing a glitch with the platform which was hindering them from retrieving as many questions as possible. Since no emails were sent to explain the situation, I sensed something ominous incoming.

Simultaneously around this period, I saw the appearance of a bot capable of answering questions on the platform. The answers provided by the bot looked clumsy and differed significantly from the format subject experts like myself followed. Some of the answers were also factually incorrect, but that is expected from generative artificial intelligence. Since the answers being supplied would require humans to fact-check, my thought was that the subject matter expert roles would likely evolve into another role entirely. Little did I know that I was mistaken.

Last week, I received the following email from the team that recruited me for the platform:

Immediately I saw the length of the message, I had an idea of what the content would be even before reading it. The TL;DR of the message is—we just gave your job to an AI trained from the content you've been supplying over the years.

For those who have been arguing against AI taking people's jobs, I hereby present myself as a victim. Beyond ordinary debates, we have now seen the consequences of AI evolution, and this may be just the beginning. While I was lamenting my situation to a friend of mine who happens to be a programmer, he just laughed. I tried to manufacture an excuse for the platform. They probably laid me and other experts off because students would rather turn their questions into generative AI like ChatGPT for help rather than subscribe $100 a month to a platform for human-generated answers. Thus, a reduction in their revenue leaves them with no other options.

His response opened my eyes. He said companies don't necessarily need to experience a drop in their revenue before laying off staff. Everyone's greed is going up a notch, and firms are looking to rake in as much profit as the market would allow. If companies can downsize their staff and automate their jobs using AI, it will generate more revenue in the long run, even if they have to spend a lot initially to train the AI.

At the end of our discussion, he dropped a bombshell.

"I also lost my job to AI last week."

The AI industry is still new, and I can imagine the number of people affected already. Imagine what is going to happen in the next, let's say, five to ten years.

Let's brace for impact.

Posted Using InLeo Alpha