AI Replaces Staff

It starts.  Selectively expected

Suumit Shah, founder of an e-commerce website, said that his firm had laid off 90% of its support staff.

An Indian CEO is being criticised after he said that his firm had replaced 90% of its support staff with an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot.

Suumit Shah, founder of Dukaan, said on Twitter that the chatbot had drastically improved first response and resolution time of customers' queries, The tweet sparked outrage online.

It comes at a time when there has been a lot of conversation and apprehension about AI taking away people's jobs, specially in the services industry.

In a series of tweets, which have over one million views, Mr Shah wrote about his firm's decision to use a chatbot. He said that though laying off staff had been a "tough" decision, it was "necessary".. 

BBC Talks AI Job Loss from their Perspective

Initial look at AI Related Job losses, Intro.

The workers already replaced by artificial intelligence

Published, 2 days ago

Dean Meadowcroft never thought that AI would replace him

By Ian Rose, Business reporter, BBC News

Until recently Dean Meadowcroft was a copywriter in a small marketing department., His duties included writing press releases, social media posts and other content for his company., But then, late last year, his firm introduced an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system.

"At the time the idea was that it would be working alongside human lead copywriters to help speed up the process, essentially streamline things a little bit more," he says., Mr Meadowcroft was not particularly impressed with the AI's work.

"It just kind of made everybody sound middle of the road, on the fence, and exactly the same, and therefore nobody really stands out."

The content also had to be checked by human staff to make sure it had not been lifted from anywhere else.

But the AI was fast. What might take a human copywriter between 60 and 90 minutes to write, the AI could do in 10 minutes or less.

Around four months after the AI was introduced, Mr Meadowcroft's four-strong team was laid off., Mr Meadowcroft can't be certain, but he's pretty sure the AI replaced them.

"I did laugh-off the idea of AI replacing writers, or affecting my job, until it did," he said.

The latest wave of AI hit late last year when OpenAI launched ChatGPT.

Backed by Microsoft, ChatGPT can give human-like responses to questions and can, in minutes, generate essays, speeches, even recipes.

Other tech giants are scrambling to launch their own systems - Google launched Bard in March.

While not perfect, such systems are trained on the ocean of data available on the internet - an amount of information impossible for even a team of humans to digest.

So that's left many wondering which jobs might be at risk.

Presentational grey line

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Why car parks are the hottest space in solar power

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Earlier this year, a report from Goldman Sachs said that AI could potentially replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs.

Any job losses would not fall equally the economy. According to the report, 46% of tasks in administrative and 44% in legal professions could be automated, but only 6% in construction and 4% in maintenance.

The report also points out that the introduction of AI could boost productivity and growth and might create new jobs.

There is some evidence of that already.  ... '  "  

McKinsey’s A.I. Chief Discusses ChatGPT’s Impact on Consulting Jobs

Job impact seen.

McKinsey’s A.I. Chief Discusses ChatGPT’s Impact on Consulting Jobs

McKinsey's A.I. chief Alex Singla: 'Problem-solving, creativity and change management' aren't replaced by technology.

By Sissi Cao • 06/07/23 1:36pm

Artificial intelligence is taking human jobs. Just last month, A.I. eliminated about 4,000 jobs in the U.S., according to a June 1 report by Challenger, Gray & Christmas. As the generative A.I. phenomenon spreads, it is only a matter of time before the technology replaces management consultants, the archetypal white-collar job of data analysis, information summarizing and PowerPoint-making. The things that A.I. tools like ChatGPT can do.

Large consulting firms are embracing the technology and adjusting their expectations for talent in the post-ChatGPT era. At McKinsey & Company, one of the world’s largest management consulting firms, about half of its 30,000 employees now use ChatGPT or similar tools in their work, said Ben Ellencweig, a senior partner at McKinsey, at a company event yesterday (June 6) in New York.

Generative A.I. is drastically changing the day-to-day activities of management consultants, especially at the entry-level. At McKinsey, a junior consultant’s first day typically entails what the firm calls “know,” or reading pages and pages of non-confidential information to learn about a certain industry or sector the firm serves.

“When I started at the firm, I’d spend an entire weekend just getting swamped reading document after document. Now A.I. models can synthesize the 10 key things you need to know within minutes. That’s a major, major shift,” Alex Singla, a senior partner at McKinsey and the global leader of QuantumBlack, the firm’s A.I. consulting branch, told Observer in an interview at yesterday’s event. Singla has been with the firm since 2000. He currently oversees more than 1,300 analytics experts across McKinsey under the QuantumBlack umbrella. ... .'    (read more at the link)

Adobe to Integrate AI into Photoshop

 Having used Adobe capabilities I think this could be a very big thing. 

Adobe to Integrate AI into Photoshop amid Fears of Job Losses, Mass Faking of Images

By The Guardian (U.K.)  May 24, 2023

Adobe is integrating its generative AI product, Firefly, into Photoshop, its flagship image editing software. 

A potential response when AI-enhanced Adobe Photoshop is asked for an image of a “long-haired dachshund with long flowing rainbow hair.”

Software giant Adobe has announced it will integrate generative AI into its widely used Photoshop program, while downplaying fears the move will lead to job losses and mass fakes.

The brand most associated with image editing will incorporate the generative AI product Adobe Firefly, which launched as a beta six weeks ago, creating a tool the company says will become a "co-pilot" to graphic design rather than a replacement for humans.

Using the "generative fill" feature, Photoshop users will be able to add to, expand or remove unwanted items from images using a text prompt similar to those used by Dall-E and Midjourney, such as "long haired dachshund with long flowing rainbow hair."

From The Guardian (U.K.)  Full Article

Your Job is (probably) Safe from Artificial Intelligence

Surprised a bit by the Economist opinion.  True prediction of that future is hard.

ACM NEWS

Your Job is (probably) Safe from Artificial Intelligence

By The Economist, May 11, 2023

No one can predict with any certainty where a technology as fundamentally unpredictable as AI will take humans.

Credit: Vincent Kilbride

The age of "generative" artificial intelligence has well and truly arrived. Openai's chatbots, which use large-language-model (llm) technology, got the ball rolling in November. Now barely a day goes by without some mind-blowing advance. An ai-powered song featuring a fake "Drake" and "The Weeknd" recently shook the music industry. Programs which convert text to video are making fairly convincing content. Before long consumer products such as Expedia, Instacart and OpenTable will plug into Openai's bots, allowing people to order food or book a holiday by typing text into a box. A recently leaked presentation, reportedly from a Google engineer, suggests the tech giant is worried about how easy it is for rivals to make progress. There is more to come—probably a lot more.

The development of ai raises profound questions. Perhaps most pressing, though, is a straightforward one. What does this mean for the economy? Many have grand expectations. New research by Goldman Sachs, a bank, suggests that "widespread ai adoption could eventually drive a 7% or almost $7trn increase in annual global gdp over a ten-year period." Academic studies point to a three-percentage-point rise in annual labour-productivity growth in firms that adopt the technology, which would represent a huge uplift in incomes compounded over many years. A study published in 2021 by Tom Davidson of Open Philanthropy, a grantmaking outfit, puts a more than 10% chance on "explosive growth"—defined as increases in global output of more than 30% a year—sometime this century. A few economists, only half-jokingly, hold out the possibility of global incomes becoming infinite.

View Full Article  

By The Economist, May 11, 2023

IBM halts hiring for 7,800 jobs that could be replaced by AI

 Not unexpected, like more on the detailed type of these jobs

IBM halts hiring for 7,800 jobs that could be replaced by AI 

Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert in BusinessInsider ...

IBM will slow or suspend hiring for back-office roles that AI could replace.

IBM's CEO told Bloomberg 7,800 jobs, roughly 30% of back-end roles, would be replaced over 5 years.

Roles in human resources and non-customer-facing jobs will be impacted.

For you: 10 Things in Tech newsletter — top scoops, gadgets and news.... ' 

The Potential Impact of Large Language Models on Jobs

As usual a great piece by Irving Wladawsky-Berger here, I am following through.  Lots of good links, but these are available through the link below.

The Potential Impact of Large Language Models on Jobs

Throughout the Industrial Revolution there were periodic panics about the impact of automation on jobs, going back to the Luddites, - textile workers who in the 1810s smashed the new machines that were threatening their jobs. But each time those fears arose in the past, technology advances ended up creating more jobs than they destroyed.

Automation fears have understandbly accelerated in recent years, as our increasingly smart machines have been applied to activities requiring intelligence and cognitive capabilities that not long ago were viewed as the exclusive domain of humans. Over the past decade, powerful AI systems have matched or surpassed human levels of performance in a number of tasks such as image and speech recognition, skin cancer classification, breast cancer detection, and highly complex games like Go. More recently, large language models (LLMs) and chatbots like ChatGPT are taking AI-based automation to a whole new level.

 “OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the latest advance in a steady march of innovations that have offered the potential to transform many occupations and wipe out others, sometimes in tandem,” wrote journalists Lydia DePillis and Steve Lohr in “Tinkering With ChatGPT, Workers Wonder: Will This Take My Job?,” a recent NY Times article. “It is too early to tally the enabled and the endangered, or to gauge the overall impact on labor demand and productivity. But it seems clear that artificial intelligence will impinge on work in different ways than previous waves of technology.” In particular, AI is now “confronting white-collar professionals more directly than ever. It could make them more productive — or obsolete.”

“Artificial intelligence and machine learning have been operating in the background of many businesses for years, helping to evaluate large numbers of possible decisions and better align supply with demand, for example,” the article added. “ChatGPT, however, is the first to confront such a broad range of white-collar workers so directly, and to be so accessible that people could use it in their own jobs. And it is improving rapidly, with a new edition released this month.”

In the past few decades, the jobs most susceptible to automation were blue-collar occupations in manufacturing industries, and white-collar occupations like accounting and record keeping. At the same time, jobs that required the kinds of non-routine problem solving and complex communications skills typically seen in managerial, professional and technical occupations significantly expanded with the earnings of the college educated workers needed to fill them steadily rising.

How will the next few decades play out given the potential wider scope of AI-based automation, including the jobs of high-skilled, highly educated professionals. Will continuing advances in AI end up eliminating more jobs than they create?

In the spring of 2018, then MIT president Rafael Reif commissioned a major MIT-wide task force to address the impact of AI on jobs, economies, and society in general.  After working for two years, the task force released its final report, “The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines,” in November of 2020.   ... ' 

Resumes, Jobs, Interviews and ChatGPT Challenges HR

 Ethical?  But does show advanced thinking.  Are responses reasonable?  Some early stats.

Most Job Seekers Who Used ChatGPT to Write Their Resume Get an Interview

By ResumeBuilder, February 14, 2023

Forty percent of respondents said their job interviewer didn't know they used ChatGPT to write application materials.

ChatGPT is making waves across in recruitment and HR. Forty-six percent of job seekers are using the AI chatbot to write their resumes and/or cover letters, and seven in 10 report a higher response rate from companies, according to a February survey of current and recent job seekers.

The survey also found that 78% of respondents got an interview when using application materials written by ChatGPT; 59% were hired after applying to a job using materials written by ChatGPT; and 11% were denied a job when the interviewer discovered they used ChatGPT.

The primary motivation for job seekers using ChatGPT to write their application materials is to save time. Sixty-nine percent said the materials gave them a somewhat or much  higher response rate from companies. A majority are receiving interviews and job offers as well.

From ResumeBuilder

View Full Article    

Google/Alphabet Cutting Jobs

Tech slipping.  To be replaced by AI? 

Google's parent company Alphabet will cut 12,000 jobs, in the latest staff redundancies to hit the tech industry.   in BBD

Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said he took "full responsibility" for the cuts, in an internal email.  The cuts will affect 6% of Alphabet's workforce worldwide, in teams including recruitment and engineering.  This comes days after Microsoft announced 10,000 jobs would be lost, and weeks after Amazon announced 18,000 job cuts.

Mr Pichai thanked staff for "working so hard" in their roles, adding that their "contributions have been invaluable".  He wrote: "While this transition won't be easy, we're going to support employees as they look for their next opportunity.

"Until then, please take good care of yourselves as you absorb this difficult news. As part of that, if you are just starting your work day, please feel free to work from home today."

According to a recent filing with Companies House, Google has more than 5,500 staff in the UK. But it is unclear how many of these will be affected by the cuts.   .... '

Logistics Slowdown

 A Logistics Slowdown.

 U.S. Warehouse Sector Loses Jobs for Fourth Month in Cooling Sign  in SupplyChainBrain

The U.S. warehousing sector lost jobs for a fourth month in October, suggesting employment in an industry that’s boomed during the pandemic may have peaked.

About 1.7 million people worked in warehousing and storage in October, a 1.1% decline from September, government figures released Friday show. The drop — at a time of the year when companies typically start to ramp up staffing ahead of the holidays — was the biggest since April 2020.   ... ' 

Tech Workers Long Got What they Wanted?

How true?

Tech Workers Long Got What They Wanted. That's Over

The Wall Street Journal, By Katherine Bindley, July 15, 2022

Technology workers who once could name their salaries and expect to be allowed to work from anywhere increasingly are encountering resistance from both startups and tech giants. Amid fears of a recession, more employers are slowing their hiring, rethinking remote jobs, and even rescinding some job offers. Companies like Microsoft, Netflix, and Twitter recently reported layoffs, and Google announced plans to pull back on hiring for the remainder of the year. Recruiters, however, say highly skilled workers in areas like machine learning and artificial intelligence still have an advantage. Further, CompTIA reported more than a half-million tech jobs were posted in June, marking a 62% gain over the same time a year ago. ... ' 

Deep Fake Job Seekers

Note how remote working can aid this.

Deepfakes Are Interviewing For Tech Jobs  in Extremetech

By Adrianna Nine on July 5, 2022

The tech industry has been rife with recruiting issues in recent years, from post-interview ghosting to bait-and-switch tactics affecting both sides of a job offer. But now the FBI is warning tech companies to look out for an unexpected challenge: deepfake interviewees. 

Bad actors are impersonating other people via deepfakes to weasel their way into remote work positions, according to the agency’s latest public service announcement. The wrongdoer starts by gathering enough of their target’s personal information to convincingly apply to jobs as that person. Then they acquire a few high-quality photos of the person, either through theft or a bit of casual online sleuthing. When interview time rolls around, the bad actor uses the photos (and sometimes voice spoofing) to create and deploy a deepfake, which often passes for the target in a video medium.   ... ' 

Cybersecurity Workers Needed

Qualified workers needed for talent pipeline. 

 Hackers' Path Eased as 600,000 U.S. Cybersecurity Jobs Sit Empty

Bloomberg, Olivia Rockeman, March 30, 2022   in Boomberg

Cybersecurity jobs search platform CyberSeek estimates roughly 600,000 vacant U.S. cybersecurity positions, including 560,000 private-sector jobs. The pandemic compounded a shortfall of cybersecurity professionals, while phishing and ransomware attacks escalated due to many employees using their home networks and computers. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management's Stuart Madnick cites a lack of qualified cybersecurity workers, while Bryan Palma at cybersecurity company Trellix said nations like Russia and China host better talent pipelines at the government level of people trained in cybersecurity. Max Shuftan at the SANS Institute cybersecurity training organization said the worker shortage especially impacts smaller organizations like civilian public agencies, most of which cannot match private companies' pay. As a result, Shuftan warned, "They're probably not going have the staff and that makes them more vulnerable to attacks."

Full Article 

Euro Automation and Jobs

 More looks at the influence of robotics on Jobs

Automation Could Make 12 Million Jobs in Europe Redundant

in ZDNet, Owen Hughes, January 20, 2022

Automation could render up to 12 million jobs in Europe superfluous over the next 20 years as companies compete to boost productivity and fill skills gaps amid an aging workforce, reports research company Forrester. Retail, food services, and leisure and hospitality occupations could face the largest losses, with mid-labor jobs involving simple, routine tasks most vulnerable. A total of 49 million jobs in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Britain could potentially be automated by 2040, imperiling casual work and low-paid, part-time labor. Pandemic-reduced productivity is prompting organizations to consider automation to restore efficiency, while sectors that were already using automation have increased investment to grow service delivery and mitigate pandemic constraints. Academic forecasts of jobs potentially lost to automation vary, with Forrester noting machine learning experts "imagine future computer capabilities without understanding enterprise technology adoption constraints and the cultural barriers within an organization that resist change." ...  

How Does AI Improve Human Decision-Making

Improve, but always in contexts that make it hard to measure. 

How Does AI Improve Human Decision-Making?  by Irving Wladawsky-Berger

“Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the newest general-purpose technology (GPT),” wrote Sukwoong Choia, Namil Kim, Junsik Kim, and Hyo Kang in a recent paper, How Does AI Improve  Human Decision-Making? Evidence from the AI-Powered Go Program. “One remarkable characteristic of AI is its ability to provide humans with high-quality predictions at relatively low cost and to automate a wide range of predictions. AI has already outperformed human professionals in many domains - including strategic gameplay, medical diagnosis, and new drug development.” 

“Furthermore, as a GPT, the domains where AI outperforms humans are expanding at a fast pace. The rapid development and adoption of AI thus raise an interesting yet pressing question about how AI affects human tasks in these various domains. Studies of AI and human capital, for instance, have examined the performance gap between humans and AI, highlighting AI’s potential for replacing jobs.” However, we should keep in mind that new technologies have been replacing workers and transforming economies for over two centuries. But, over time, these same technologies led to the creation of whole new industries and new jobs, increasing productivity and economic output, raising earnings, and augmenting the demand for labor. ... ' 

Economists Look at Robotics Surge

More on the topic of robotics influencing employment.

Economists Are Revising Their Views on Robots and Jobs

By The Economist, February 16, 2022

When the pandemic first struck, unemployment soared. Not since the Depression had American joblessness surpassed 14%, as it did in April 2020. But fears of a prolonged period of high unemployment did not come to pass. According to the latest available data, for November, the unemployment rate for the OECD club of mostly rich countries was only marginally higher than it was before the pandemic. By now it may even have drawn level. The rich world's labour-market bounceback is the latest phenomenon provoking economists to look again at a foundational question in the discipline: whether robots help or harm workers.

The gloomy narrative, which says that an invasion of job-killing robots is just around the corner, has for decades had an extraordinary hold on the popular imagination. Warning people of a jobless future has, ironically enough, created plenty of employment for ambitious public intellectuals looking for a book deal or a speaking opportunity. Shortly before the pandemic, though, other researchers were starting to question the received wisdom. The world was supposedly in the middle of an artificial-intelligence and machine-learning revolution, but by 2019 employment rates across advanced economies had risen to all-time highs. Japan and South Korea, where robot use was among the highest of all, happened to have the lowest rates of unemployment....

Two years into the pandemic, the evidence for automation-induced unemployment is scant, even as global investment spending surges...

From The Economist

View Full Article 

Paying Older Audience Attention

Brought to my attention, being in the older, more experienced audience myself, struck me as rarely paid attention to.   Good first look at this kind of resource problem.

Your Messaging to Older Audiences Is Outdated   by Hal Hershfield and Laura Carstensen

July 02, 2021

Summary.   Given a rapidly aging population, effective messaging to older people holds national importance for public health as well as marketing of goods and services. Older people make up an incredibly diverse demographic that varies in terms of physical and cognitive ability,...more

One of the most pressing concerns in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic was how to best communicate information to those who were at greatest risk — particularly, the elderly. Unfortunately, many attempts were riddled with stereotyped depictions of older people as frail, lonely, and incompetent. In doing so, messages from advertisers, public health officials, and policymakers may have failed to resonate with large swaths of their targeted audience. Given a rapidly aging population, effective messaging to older people holds national importance for public health as well as marketing of goods and services.

Arguably, the greatest challenge is market segmentation. Older people make up an incredibly diverse demographic that varies in terms of physical and cognitive ability, economic power, and social connection. Aging is also changing over historical time. Several studies have shown that the incidence of dementia appears to be decreasing over time; some research suggests this is due to higher educational attainment and improvements in cardiovascular health. Today’s older generations are less lonely and happier than their younger counterparts. As a result, market segmentation based on chronological age is becoming increasingly difficult, if not futile.

A more telling predictor of behavior and a better approach to age segmentation may be time left in life rather than time since birth. Healthy versus sick offers more meaningful insight than whether someone is in their 70s or their 80s.  ... 

Fake Job Offers

No longer in the market, but in between had received a number of 'too good to be true' offers to start employment.   Many via Linkedin.     Although they look targeted, a quick search finds them broadly scoped, and they quickly fall apart.   No legit company will ask for detailed personal data up front.  Caution is important.

How to Tell a Job Offer from an ID Theft Trap  in Krebs on Security

One of the oldest scams around — the fake job interview that seeks only to harvest your personal and financial data — is on the rise, the FBI warns. Here’s the story of a recent LinkedIn impersonation scam that led to more than 100 people getting duped, and one almost-victim who decided the job offer was too-good-to-be-true.

Last week, someone began posting classified notices on LinkedIn for different design consulting jobs at Geosyntec Consultants, an environmental engineering firm based in the Washington, D.C. area. Those who responded were told their application for employment was being reviewed and that they should email Troy Gwin — Geosyntec’s senior recruiter — immediately to arrange a screening interview.

Gwin contacted KrebsOnSecurity after hearing from job seekers trying to verify the ad, which urged respondents to email Gwin at a Gmail address that was not his. Gwin said LinkedIn told him roughly 100 people applied before the phony ads were removed for abusing the company’s terms of service.

“The endgame was to offer a job based on successful completion of background check which obviously requires entering personal information,” Gwin said. “Almost 100 people applied. I feel horrible about this. These people were really excited about this ‘opportunity’.”   ... ' 

500K Jobs in Cybersecurity

Seems a very large number.  As I see it most of the jobs in this area today are broad and deep, and thus harder to fill.  Depends on the definition.  Perhaps they should be defined down to be less technical and more behavioral.

ACM TECHNEWS

U.S. Has Almost 500,000 Job Openings in Cybersecurity

The U.S. Commerce Department's Cyber Seek technology job-tracking database and the trade group CompTIA count about 465,000 current U.S. cybersecurity job openings.

Experts said private businesses and government agencies' need for more cybersecurity staff has unlocked a prime opportunity for anyone considering a job in that field.

The University of San Diego's Michelle Moore suggested switching to a cybersecurity career could be as simple as obtaining a Network+ or Security+ certification, while an eight-week online course could help someone gain an entry-level job earning $60,000 to $90,000 a year as a penetration tester, network security engineer, or incident response analyst.

Moore cited a lack of skilled cybersecurity personnel as a problem, while CompTIA's Tim Herbert said only a small percentage of computer science graduates pursue cybersecurity careers.  ... " 

Microsoft Plans a Re-Skilling with Linkedin

An interesting approach of Microsoft to use their data and marketing capabilities via Linkedin to target jobsand job markets.    Makes the assumption that Microsoft will be making the right calls with their forecasts.  

Microsoft Targets 50,000 Jobs with LinkedIn 'Re-skilling' Effort

In Reuters, Stephen Nellis,  March 30, 2021

Microsoft announced its intent to hire 50,000 people for jobs requiring technology skills over the next three years, as part of a broader campaign with professional networking site LinkedIn to re-skill workers affected by the pandemic for new fields. Microsoft said the placements will be within its "ecosystem" of companies that utilize or help sell its products. The push began late last year as pandemic-related business closures had a greater impact on service workers than on technology and other white-collar employees who could work from home. LinkedIn offered many paid digital skills training courses for free, ranging from software development to data analysis to financial analysis. The site said it will extend the free courses until year's end, while Microsoft and LinkedIn estimate that total enrollees have reached 30.7 million, up from an expected 25 million. ... '