As AI Tools Take More Jobs From Humans, Women will be More Affected - Report

By Jacob J
May 27, 2023 10:27 +08

Jobs across sectors are being cut around the world and humans replaced by artificial intelligence technologies. It is predicted that a wider share of job roles held by humans currently will be taken over AI models in the future. According to a new report, this AI-driven job cull will not pan out evenly across the gender divide. The report says that women will be affected more than men.

Deeply Rooted Biases

"The distribution of genders across occupations reflects the biases deeply rooted in our society, with women often being confined to roles such as administrative assistants and secretaries ...Consequently, the impact of AI becomes skewed along gender lines," Bloomberg News quoted a Japanese economist as saying.

A gender breakdown of roles affected by AI revealed that most jobs to be replaced by AI are now being held by women. These jobs include bill and account collectors, payroll clerks and executive secretaries, the article says.

Earlier this month, British Telecom said it would slashing more than 50,000 job over the next several years as it reshapes the business and as the impact of cutting edge AI technologies unravel. BT will end up slashing nearly 55,000 by 2030, which amounts to about 40 percent of the behemoth's workforce, Reuters reported on Thursday.

BT will soon explore new products and services using generative AI and large language model AIs.

BT CEO Philip Jansen explained that at least 10,000 human roles will be directly replaced by AI, digitization and automation. He said artificial intelligence technology will help in delivering more seamless customer services. "We will be a beneficiary of AI unequivocally .... Our chatbot Amy deals with lots of customer queries already," he said.

Also in May, International Business Machines Corp (IBM) said it was laying out a strategy under which artificial intelligence (AI) will replace thousands of human job roles in the company in the future. The plan is to either slow or even suspend hiring in jobs that are not customer-facing. IBM calculates that there are at least 26,000 such job roles in the company that fall in the category that includes mainly back-office functions like human resources.

"Moving forward, providing retraining opportunities will be key for women to navigate the evolving job landscape," Ozdenoren said. "By doing so, we can capitalize on the potential of AI while leveraging their valuable skills and expertise," explained Hakki Ozdenoren, economist at Revelio Labs, according to Bloomberg.

According to researchers, ChatGPT and similar advanced AI bots will replace humans in several jobs in the future. The following are some of them, as per a Yahoo Finance report.

1. Programming, Software Engineers : Tech jobs like web developers, computer programmers, data scientists and coders can be replaced by AI technologies. Madgavkar said ChatGPT can produce faster coding with relative accuracy than humans.

2. Media: AI tools can disrupt jobs in content creation. The expert highlighted that ChatGPT is able to read, write and understand text-based data. She explained that analyzing and interpreting vast amounts of language based data and information is a skill that one would expect AI technologies to ramp up on. As such, journalism, creative writing and technical writing jobs would be replaced. It should be noted that CNET, a tech news platform, used an AI tool like ChatGPT to write dozens of articles and BuzzFeed is set to use tech from the ChatGPT maker to generate new forms of content.

3. Legal Industry: Paralegals, legal assistants, and language-oriented roles are susceptible to automation. Madgavkar said data is quite structured, very language-oriented, and quite amendable to generative AI. But AI won't be able to fully automate these jobs as it requires a degree of human judgment to understand what the client wants. "It's like a bit of productivity boost that some of these occupations might get, because you can use tools that actually do it better," Madgavkar said.

ChatGPT IANS

4. Market Research Analysts: A senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, Mark Muro believes market research jobs would be taken over by AI tools because artificial intelligence is good at analyzing data and predicting outcomes. Market research analysts collect data, identify trends within the data and use the results to create effective marketing campaigns. Muro said this can be handled well by AI.

5. Finance Jobs: These are mainly to do with number crunching. Jobs, such as financial analyst, and personal financial advisor that require manipulating significant amounts of numerical data can be affected by AI. Muro pointed out that AI can identify trends in the market, highlight what investments in a portfolio are doing better and worse, use various other forms of data and forecast a better investment mix.

6. Traders: Wall Street jobs can be replaced by AI as its all about data, figures and forecasts. This can be better done by AI than humans who are hired right out of college and take huge amounts of salary.

7. Teachers: After students used ChatGPT to cheat on their homework, Pengcheng Shi from Rochester Institute of Technology, believes teachers should worry about their jobs. He said ChatGPT can easily teach classes and it can be trained to do so, that is, after the tool has been improved Ã¢â'¬" bugs and inaccuracies gotten rid off

8. Graphic Designers: AI is already being used to create and generate images. One good example is DALL-E. An article in Harvard Business Review stated that upskilling millions of people in their ability to create and manipulate images will have profound impact on the economy. "Recent advances in AI will usher in a period of hardship and economic pain for those whose jobs are directly impacted and who find it hard to adapt."

9: Customer Service: Jobs in customer service will definitely be affected. Companies are already deployed automatic answering systems or Chatbots to direct calls and sort out matters.

10. Accountants: This profession also deals with number crunching and balance sheets which can be easily achieved by AI. Brett Caraway, associate professor with the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology at the University of Toronto, said technology hasn't put everybody out of job yet, but it does put some people out of a job. He explained that it is something new and will be interesting to see how disruptive and painful it would be for employment and politics.

According to a survey, 51 percent of employers are considering cutting roles and looking to deploy ChatGPT in their marketing and PR departments. Furthermore, the recent layoffs in Google and Microsoft cited focus on AI and automation. There are also concerns about the loss of human touch. But then this is just the beginning, it's yet to be seen how far robotics and AI will go.

Related topics : Artificial intelligence