The ChatGPT Revolution: Will Artificial Intelligence Reshape the Global Economy?

Controversy and anxiety occupy the labor market all over the world, centering around the possibility of Artificial Intelligence (AI) taking over the business sector, especially after the launch of the OpenAI chatbot, ChatGPT. Is AI threatening workers with losing their jobs?

Forbes magazine tried to answer this question, and concluded in a report that there are five jobs in the world that will be devoured by AI during the next decade, and its workers may find themselves without jobs and turn into the ranks of the unemployed.

According to reports and studies, many jobs are threatened with extinction due to digital transition and the solutions of AI to replace human labor in their implementation, which creates a challenge for individuals who are losing their job opportunities that they used to occupy with the possibility that there are no alternatives.

Consequently, the severity of the crisis increased with time due to the deteriorating economic conditions on the one hand and the control of AI on the labor market on the other hand.

In turn, The Economist magazine reported that technology experts have claimed for decades that AI will revolutionize the business world, generating huge benefits for companies and consumers, pointing out that this claim has finally begun to materialize.

According to a study conducted by McKinsey Consulting and published last December, last year 50% of companies around the world experimented with apps related to AI in one way or another, compared to 20% in 2017.

 

ChatGPT

Since its beta launch in November 2022, ChatGPT has received widespread interest and positive feedback due to its quick, detailed, and clear answers in several areas of knowledge.

According to statistics, the number of its users exceeded one million people in a few days, although the tool is still not available on Android and iOS systems.

ChatGPT is a chatbot that works using AI, developed by the American company OpenAI, an organization specialized in AI research and the promotion and development of its systems.

The app answers users’ questions in a creative way and writes articles on demand, using a database based on web content published before late 2021.

Despite the release of several previous content-writing tools, ChatGBT is a real revolution because its software is based on accurate and continuous communication with the user, as if it preserves the history and details of the relationship between them.

However, what is shocking about this bot is what was revealed by a study conducted by academics at Stanford University about the tendency of the GBT3 text-completion tool to add words dealing with violence whenever the user wrote something like “Two Muslims walk into a…,” unlike when it comes to Christians or Buddhists, for example.

In addition, a quarter of the organizations participating in the McKinsey study reported that AI had only boosted their revenues by about 5%.

On the other hand, only the tech firms themselves are expected to achieve a jump in revenues of more than 20% thanks to AI techniques, while analysts have predicted that these percentages are likely to rise steadily as artificial intelligence becomes a common daily affair.

 

Major Changes

The launch of ChatGPT late last year sparked widespread concerns about the economic benefits of this new tech in the business sector, as well as its negative impacts on the labor market.

Many jobs may benefit from this AI, such as customer service by communicating with them and solving their problems, programming of all kinds, advertising sector, and secretarial work.

On the other hand, the expectations of Forbes magazine indicate that AI may take over jobs that employ about a billion people worldwide during the next ten years, which may lead to the abolition of about 375 million jobs.

It pointed out that startups are promoting the ability to employ AI in almost every imaginable industry and that it is now almost everywhere after its popularity and importance were slowly increasing in the past, but it has begun to witness a wide spread recently.

According to Forbes, the five jobs threatened by AI, some of which have already occurred for some time, are: Factory workers, couriers, investment analysts, customer service, and security guards.

Meanwhile, many expressed their fears about the impact of the matter on the economy, pointing out that AI will shape the face of the global economy again, as the nature of the workforce will change dramatically, as well as the nature of managing the economy itself.

They also indicated that most routine jobs will be threatened and their owners will easily lose their jobs, along with some creative jobs such as writing and design, in which AI has shown great superiority so far, while some have argued that human creativity cannot be replaced no matter how advanced AI is.

In turn, e-marketing specialist Janet Machuka explained—in her tweet—that “AI may automate certain jobs, but it will also create new opportunities.”

“Experts predict that AI will bring major changes to the job market, both positive and negative,” Machuka added.

On his part, financial analyst Read Jerome said: “If AI is taking our jobs I hope companies are designing products for AI to buy because we’ll have no money.”

 

New Era

On the other hand, The Economist magazine stated that tech firms themselves represent the first sector to adopt AI, as since the beginning of the current century, machine learning techniques have provided assistance to Google in promoting online advertising activity.

Similarly, today, machine intelligence is helping website users to get improved search results and to complete sentences they write in their emails.

The magazine pointed out that AI is now managing Amazon’s supply chains, ordering robots in the company’s warehouses, and sorting job applications for it. In addition, Siri, Apple’s digital assistant, is now based on AI that also enhances posts on social media owned by Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram).

In this regard, The Economist indicated that the booming AI scene contrasts with the pessimistic mood prevailing in the tech sector, which is mired in a deep recession.

PredictLeads, a data organization, also stated that major US firms announced during September, October, and November 2022 about seven thousand vacancies in the fields of AI and machine learning; that is, a 10-fold increase from the same number during the first quarter of 2020.

In 2022, venture capitalists will pour $67 billion into companies developing AI-powered applications, according to Pitchbook, an enterprise data firm.

Between January and October 2022, 28 new AI unicorns (private startups valued at $1 billion or more) have been minted.

In the same context, the New York Times reported on January 23, 2023, that Microsoft has sobered up on the future of AI and decided to invest $10 billion in OpenAI, while Alphabet, which controls Google, plans to pump $200 million into Cohere, a competitor to OpenAI.

The newspaper noted that the strong rise of ChatGPT and the trend towards it to obtain answers to all inquiries has become a clear threat to the search engine Google and put the company in a state of great anxiety after years of almost complete monopoly on the search engine market.

According to reports, Google, whose revenues were estimated at $257 billion in 2021, is afraid today of the end of its tech era and the entry into a new era occupied by other software that turns the table and forces it to move quickly to change its direction.

As a result, Google has enlisted experts Larry Page and Sergey Brin to help add ChatGPT-like features to the search engine they launched more than 25 years ago.

The newspaper also noted that former employees of OpenAI and DeepMind (an AI lab at Alphabet) had launched at least 22 AI startups.

Projections indicate that the size of the AI market is expected to reach about $13 trillion to $15 trillion by 2030, compared to only $65 billion in 2020.

AI has the potential to increase 1.2% of global GDP annually, according to a McKinsey study, while the number of organizations and firms that are applying AI has grown by 270% in the past four years.

After all of the above, it turns out, according to observers, that AI may not actually threaten the business sector at the present time or in the very short term, but it will certainly be a real and actual threat to employees and the labor market, starting from the next decade.