Generative AI tools like ChatGPT fuel fears about a white-collar recession

Article by Jacob Bourne | Jan 26, 2023

The trend: The debut of generative AI made attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos nervous about the future of white-collar jobs and the rise of misinformation.

AI can now process a mortgage application in minutes compared with the previous 30 days, according to Automation Anywhere CEO Mihir Shukla, per The Guardian.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT passed Wharton MBA and medical school exams.
It’s being used to write legislation and by C-suite executives.
It’s also writing news articles while Copilot writes computer code and DALL-E creates art.
Meta’s Cicero beat humans at a game of social strategy and diplomacy.
An AI program will serve as a courtroom lawyer for the first time, while AI diagnoses and devises treatments for illness.

Tech recession as harbinger: The tech industry is turning to AI as its flagship product while the layoff bloodbath continues.

Google is hatching big generative AI plans immediately after it laid off 12,000 workers, some of whom learned about their termination when their badges failed at office entryways.
Microsoft laid off 10,000 employees, including all of its VR, mixed reality, and HoloLens workers, as it was planning a $10 billion investment in OpenAI.

The overall US job market is strong for now, but if a recession hits, the fear faced by blue-collar workers for decades—that machines will replace them—will be more acutely shared by their white-collar counterparts.

The main takeaways: ChatGPT is sending shockwaves around the world, but in its current state, it’s only suitable for augmenting human creativity, not replacing it.

In the short term, human creativity will continue to be essential to the economy.
AI is trained using intellectual assets created by people, so in theory, if people stop creating, AI will run out of fresh source data.
People’s need to connect with other people and express themselves is in itself an economic driver and is what fuels a lot of the branding behind digital content that AI can’t easily substitute.

ChatGPT is a stepping stone to artificial general intelligence (AGI) for tech companies making rapid progress in the field.

AGI could be capable of working independently and creating fresh data sources.
It might also develop personalities that people will want to connect with in lieu of human relationships.
The timeline for this becoming reality is unknown, but it could happen at a pace faster than society can adapt to, fueling existential risk.