The AI’s Apprentice
This week’s lunch talk was about how, when, and by how much AI will come for our jobs, and who will train the next generation of experts?
Nervous laughter accompanied jokes to management asking when us humans would be obsolete in our jobs?
I made my usual comment about how these AI tools filled the niche that included spelling-checkers, and other things that make my mundane tasks easier. This ought to mean that I could put more effort into the parts of my job that required my “special human expertise”
Colleagues mentioned managers in other companies whose tech teams were already were automating many of their tasks. Increasingly, the manager’s role. was that of checking that the outputs were correct. This assumes that a cohort of trained humans will be available to review work generated by AI.
Some argue that only junior staff will be replaced by AI, safeguarding the expertise (and jobs!) of senior staff. Yet, seniority is often attained through years of progression from junior/apprentice though to senior roles, a journey that fosters the skills and experience necessary for senior positions.
As we outsource more “junior” and “repetitive” tasks to AI, we may find that we may not be able to grow the next generation of experts as we no longer have the same environment for juniors to gain that experience.
Will the future be one where:
We recognise the need to ‘grow’ junior through to senior staff, or
Expertise becomes something that is increasingly codified and assumed to be able to be synthesised (aka like a fast-food restaurant’s 3 ring binder)?
The reality may be a bit of A and B.
- by a Data Scientist who likes tea
