Ever since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, news about the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs has vacillated between two four-letter words: fear and hype. As a result, about two-thirds of Americans believe AI will lead to fewer jobs, while the overpromising of AI’s potential has helped lead to a similar proportion of Americans not using AI much or at all in their jobs.
By last year, however, surveys of AI’s actual impact in the workplace had started to roll in. And many indicate a move toward enhancing the application of reason, analytical judgment, and other skills of humans – and redefining intelligence to levels beyond the limits of a machine or the brain.
One federal survey in the New York-northern New Jersey area found that a large share of businesses using AI are retraining workers to utilize the technology with no significant reductions in employment. “For those who have a job, they are more likely to be retrained than replaced by AI,” the survey concluded.
Another study by three prominent universities found that employees who were retrained to use AI earn substantially more. Meanwhile, research analysis by Morgan Stanley, a financial firm, found AI will not only augment human capabilities but also “could come with an unprecedented demand for re-skilling.” AI will be “a net positive effect on employment growth.”
“Each wave of technological transformation has brought both disruption and opportunity,” said Morgan Stanley U.S. economist Heather Berger. “We expect AI to do the same: While some roles may be automated, others will see enhancement through AI augmentation, and AI is likely to create entirely new roles.”
Upskilling means elevating the capabilities of workers beyond what they believe is their level of intelligence. The nature of work in the AI era will require an expansion of qualities, such as curiosity, intuition, and humility. “The skill that is going to be rewarded most in the short run is imagination in finding creative ways to use AI,” Rajeev Rajan of Atlassian, an office-software firm, told The Economist.
The world’s thinkers have often tried to break the belief that intelligence is human-centric. The founder of the Monitor, Mary Baker Eddy, wrote that discernment requires a capacity for spiritual understanding beyond the physical senses. “Such intuitions reveal whatever constitutes and perpetuates harmony, enabling one to do good, but not evil,” she stated in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.
Just before the debut of ChatGPT, three Dutch academics wrote in the journal Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence of the need to reconceptualize intelligence in “its many possible forms and combinations.” Human intelligence is not “the golden standard” in defining the capacity to “realize complex goals.”
AI might catch up with human intelligence, they suggested, but we should not dwell on whether “AI will outsmart us, take our jobs, or how to endow it with all kinds of human abilities.” Rather, humans can expand their capacity for judgment to better supervise the growth of AI.
