There is no shortage of hype around AI coming for jobs, and while the U.S. labor market has begun to sputter, hard evidence of AI-related job losses is scarce.
Geoffrey Hinton’s message on a recent podcast about artificial intelligence was simple: “Train to be a plumber.”
Hinton, a Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist often called “the Godfather of AI,” said in June what people have now been saying for years: Jobs that include manual labor and expertise are the least vulnerable to modern technology than some other career paths, many of which have generally been considered more respected and more lucrative.
“I think plumbers are less at risk,” Hinton said. “Someone like a legal assistant, a paralegal, they’re not going to be needed for very long.”
I agree. As usual, the answer lies somewhere in the middle. The investor class says it’ll replace everything, and pushback on the internet says it’ll replace nothing. Junior developer is definitely an apt comparison, and while they have gotten a little more coherent, my eyes have started to glaze over with the release every new model claiming to be “the one”.
The one thing the internet is bang on about is the intellectual property theft. Funny how all those laws and penalties that the likes of Disney and the MPAA pushed with millions of dollars of penalties for even small infractions never land when it’s investors gaining and true creatives losing.