ChatGPT has created a lot of anxiety, and not just about what it means for existential risk (see here), or for students cheating on assignments (see here). A lot of concern has been raised about what the rise of large language models (LLMs) means for the future of work. That is, what jobs are likely to be affected, and in particular, what jobs are likely to be replaced by LLMs?
Some initial thoughts on this have been provided by this new working paper by Ali Zarifhonarvar (Indiana University Bloomington). Zarifhonarvar mines text data from the International Standard Occupation Classification (ISCO) to identify jobs where generative AI (such as ChatGPT and other LLMs) will:
not have any influence, full impact, or partial impact on various occupations. Both the full and partial impacts can have a negative or positive outcome.
Zarifhonarvar isn't very specific about the occupations, but groups them together at the highest category of ISCO occupations, and reports that:
...in the "Professionals" category, 95 occupations are estimated to have a full impact from ChatGPT, 22 have a partial impact, and 9 have no impact. Similarly, for the "Technicians and Associate Professionals" category, 60 occupations are estimated to have a full impact, 34 have a partial impact, and 16 have no impact. In the "Managers" category, 20 occupations are estimated to have a full impact, 21 are a partial impact, and 6 are estimated to have no impact.
In the "Clerical, Service, and Sales Workers" category, 8 occupations are estimated to have a full impact, 20 have a partial impact, and 14 have no impact. In the "Craft and Related Trades Workers" category, 8 occupations are estimated to have a full impact, 33 have a partial impact, and 45 have no impact. In the "Plant and Machine Operators and Assemblers" category, 5 occupations are estimated to have a full impact, 19 have a partial impact, and 34 have no impact.
...in the "Skilled Agricultural and Trades Workers" category, 4 occupations are estimated to have a full impact, 24 are estimated to have a partial impact, and 3 are estimated to have no impact. In the "Services and Sales Workers" category, 3 of the occupations are estimated to have a full impact, 37 have a partial impact, and 18 have no impact. In the "Armed Forces Occupations" category, all the occupations are estimated to have no impact from ChatGPT. In the "Elementary Occupations" category, 0 of the occupations are estimated to have a full impact, 16 are estimated to have a partial impact, and 35 are estimated to have no impact.
It will probably surprise no one that jobs for professionals, technicians and managers are most at risk from LLMs, and jobs in 'elementary occupations' (which includes sales, unskilled agriculture and fishery jobs, and labourers) will be the least affected. However, Zarifhonarvar's analysis is very crude and fairly speculative. We can expect some more thorough analyses, including the first studies using real-world data, to become available before long. Until then, sit tight and hope that the robots aren't coming for your job!
[HT: Les Oxley]
No comments:
Post a Comment