AI is heavily relied upon by modern society. From teachers using it to help write assignments to governments using it to sift through data, it has had a huge impact on the world, but are we too dependent on it? Machines have historically taken many blue-collar jobs, especially in factories, but will AI do the same thing to white collar jobs, or will it have a different effect on companies? To find out, I asked a few people on both sides of the relationship, from builder to buyer.
I interviewed two people who build custom AI agents that do a specific task to see what they had to say. One of the first people I went to was Seth Marlatt, the founder of an AI-building company called Altir. He says that “there are a lot of jobs that are kind of these mundane activities. I think that what AI is really good at is looking at those and then helping people save their time from not having to do those activities.” He also talks more about how AI is more efficient and effective and can upscale some companies. Later, he said that “we’re in a sort of race, and there are some that get it and some that don’t.”
I also interviewed Matt Jackson, a cofounder of another AI company named Fog Solutions. He stated, “If I were to build this company 20 years ago, we would need to have 10 times as many people. But now, because the people on my team use AIs, we just have a small number of people telling AI how to build AI. And it’s kind of scary in that sense because at some point, do you even need people?” When asked how AI impacts the jobs people have, he says that people with more experience can look at code and tell whether it’s good or bad, “whereas someone who has a few months or years of experience[,] they ask AI to write the code and they don’t know if it wrote good or bad code. There’s fewer people necessary now which is why it’s harder to find jobs.”
Similarly, the people who use these AIs have matching views. I spoke with Miguel Ramirez, who helps to develop workplace technologies. Immediately I noticed similarities, with him talking a lot about how AI goes through the repetitive tasks that many people don’t want to do and AI making jobs more efficient. He also said that in his company, “it’s not replacing anyone in our technology teams yet. There’s obviously a possibility that could happen, but right now it’s really about figuring out ways to make us more productive and efficient.” He also said how it changes some things because it makes new jobs and changes some jobs, with some people having to be prompt engineers or some others fact checking it. I also talked to one final person named Brian Maloney who worked in a similar place. He says that his company hasn’t really been affected negatively by AI at all, but he does see a future where some people could lose jobs. He had many similar claims to all the other people I interviewed, which proved the point even better. He did, however, express some worry for future workers because it is harder for people who don’t know as much about the task at hand to figure out AI’s errors.
Overall, AI isn’t a huge problem yet. As most say, it needs to be fact checked because there is still tons of room for error. However, even with all these fact checks and errors, the peoples jobs are still impacted, as it takes more experienced individuals to spot these inaccuracies and fix them. When asked about whether you could simply train new software developers, Matt said that with AI, there is simply just not a need for as many of them. So all in all, though an AI job takeover isn’t current, it still changes the way people work and what their time while working goes towards.
