Should we be afraid of AI taking our jobs? Here is the answer

Automation and digitisation had already started to take hold in manufacturing companies, which was the precursor to the emergence of AI. "They've taken a lot of operations out of processes, and as operations go out, so do headcount. Obviously, the less valuable operations, the easily replaceable, repetitive routine operations, will fall out of the job very quickly as digitisation and automation take hold. And as operations fall out of the queue, a certain amount of staff disappears," says Ákos Jagudits, board member of the National Association of Human Resource Management. "The impact of AI is exponential, but it's hard to track and grasp in that sense.I don't think there are any jobs that it will save"," says Ákos Jagudits. "Technology is typically ahead of the curve and always knows more than a company. We have to live with the fact that we're constantly behind, by the time we catch up, technology has advanced again, it's ahead of us. This can be understood by living in a constant loss management. Not to mention the Hungarian knowledge inflation, which is brutal, and we are constantly falling behind, because the technology market is developing at a tremendous pace. So if we don't catch up, at least gradually, if we don't equip ourselves with tech skills and if we don't apply these technologies, we will end up in the losers' camp. It's easy to fall out of the competitive space if we don't compete enough," he said.

Akos Jagudits (National Association for Human Resource Management):I don't think there will be any jobs that will be spared by AI

"Five years ago everyone wanted to be a programmer"

"When something completely new comes along, we always try to find an analogy, and the analogy is related to the history of technology," András Kánai, a futurologist, told HR Portal. According to the expert, there are two views on this. One is that - and this can be deduced from US employment data - whatever technological progress has come, human employment has not gone down. "The number of horses used for transportation may have plummeted as the Ford Model T came in and people started driving cars, but employment didn't go down because you had to build a car factory, which needed a lot of workers. So one view is that things will continue pretty much as they have been," he explains. He adds:"artificial intelligence is expected to take people's jobs, or perhaps workflows, but it will also create jobs." So there will be new kinds of jobs, new kinds of positions - that's the optimistic view.

AI will also replace basic programming

The less optimistic view is that we are seeing a revolution in the world of artificial intelligence that calls into question how much there will be a need for, say, knowledge workers at all. "I'm thinking of editors, writers, designers, doctors, anyone who makes a living by having to think. Because these tools are doing more and more of those jobs. Let me give you an example. The last few years, the last decade - and Covid has confirmed this - have been dominated by the need for software developers, in other words programmers, because we are designing software systems, IT systems, to connect the world and to solve a whole range of problems. That's why there were a fair number of companies that were riding on this, even retraining people from completely different sectors in rapid programming schools.

Now, however, that's where artificial intelligence tools, including generative artificial intelligence tools, are getting better at it, so they don't predict big career paths here in basic programming anymore, even though five years ago everyone wanted to be a programmer," the futurist added. He said any job that "relies on manipulating signals - that could be code, text, numbers - could be at risk. He cited another recent example: "for someone who writes a presentation or at least writes down their ideas on a topic, AI programs are still very useful for them. OpenAI - the company behind ChatGPT - has come out with a feature called OpenAI Deep Research. Anyone who pays $200 a month for the package can compile research based on their commands and queries that might be the equivalent of a thousand dollar report. When they started using this a week or two ago, people said >wow, no more paying companies for reports, no need to hire a consulting firm because it puts things together so well<. If not 100 per cent, but a 90 per cent text, that's a huge amount of work and savings," said András Kánai, illustrating the impact of AI on the labour market.

Human-to-human contact is maintained

But blue-collar jobs could also be at risk, as automation and the development of robots with AI is accelerating. And this, he says, is badly needed "not just in our country, by the way, but in many, many Western countries, in America, because there are not enough skilled workers in the factories." However, András Kánai says the "input" and the "output" will always be human, but the other steps in the workflow are questionable, because it seems that AI is getting better, there is no ceiling, it will be able to do almost everything. Experts therefore advise workers to master these tools as soon as possible, because human AI will be worth more in the job market than just human ability.