Here are the 10 roles that AI is most likely to replace.
Jacob Zinkula and Aaron Mok Sep 4, 2023, 9:24 AM CDT
coders, coding, computer
Insider compiled a list of the 10 jobs that could be disrupted by
AI tools like ChatGPT, according to experts.
Jens Schlueter/Getty Images
Experts say ChatGPT and related AI could threaten some jobs,
particularly white-collar ones.
It could do so by automating mid-career, mid-ability work.
Business Insider compiled a list of 10 jobs this technology could
replace, according to experts.
Since its release in November 2022, OpenAI's ChatGPT has been used
to write cover letters, create a children's book, and even help
students cheat on their essays.
The chatbot may be more powerful than we ever imagined. Google
found that, in theory, the search engine would hire the bot as an
entry-level coder if it interviewed at the company.
Amazon employees who tested ChatGPT said it does a "very good job"
of answering customer support questions, is "great" at making
training documents, and is "very strong" at answering queries
around corporate strategy.
Companies are taking notice. Both IBM and British
telecommunications giant BT Group cited AI when announcing job
cuts earlier this year — and said that many wouldn't come back.
A recent Goldman Sachs study found that generative AI tools could,
in fact, impact 300 million full-time jobs worldwide, which could
lead to a "significant disruption" in the job market.
By 2030, nearly 12 million Americans in occupations with shrinking
demand may need to switch jobs, a McKinsey analysis published in
July found. AI was deemed a key reason — McKinsey estimated that
30% of hours worked in the US could be automated by 2030.
Human judgment needs to be applied to these technologies to avoid
error and bias, Anu Madgavkar, a partner at the McKinsey Global
Institute, told Business Insider. Users of ChatGPT have found that
the bot can generate misinformation, incorrectly answer coding
problems, and produce errors in basic math.
"We have to think about these things as productivity enhancing
tools, as opposed to complete replacements," Madgavkar said.
Business Insider talked to experts and conducted research to
compile a list of jobs that are at highest-risk for replacement by
AI.
Tech jobs (Coders, computer programmers, software engineers, data
analysts)
coders, coding, computer
Coders, software developers, and data analysts could be displaced
by AI, an expert says. Jens Schlueter/Getty Images
Coding and computer programming are in-demand skills, but it's
possible that ChatGPT and similar AI tools may fill in some of the
gaps in the near future.
Tech jobs such as software developers, web developers, computer
programmers, coders, and data scientists are "pretty amenable" to
AI technologies "displacing more of their work," Madgavkar said.
That's because AI like ChatGPT is good at crunching numbers with
relative accuracy.
In fact, advanced technologies like ChatGPT could produce code
faster than humans, which means that work can be completed with
fewer employees, Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings
Institute who has researched AI's impact on the American
workforce, told Business Insider.
"What took a team of software developers might only take some of
them," he added.
Tech companies like ChatGPT maker's OpenAI have already considered
replacing software engineers with AI.
Still, Oded Netzer, a Columbia Business School professor, thinks
that AI will help coders rather than replace them.
"In terms of jobs, I think it's primarily an enhancer than full
replacement of jobs," Netzer told CBS MoneyWatch. "Coding and
programming is a good example of that. It actually can write code
quite well."
Media jobs (advertising, content creation, technical writing,
journalism)
blogger worker
Experts say AI like ChatGPT is good at producing written content
and can do so "more efficiently than humans." Westend61/Getty
Images
Media jobs across the board — including those in advertising,
technical writing, journalism, and any role that involves content
creation — may be affected by ChatGPT and similar forms of AI,
Madgavkar said. That's because AI is able to read, write, and
understand text-based data well, she added.
"Analyzing and interpreting vast amounts of language based data
and information is a skill that you'd expect generative AI
technologies to ramp up on," Madgavkar said.
Economist Paul Krugman said in a New York Times op-ed published in
December 2022 that ChatGPT may be able to do tasks like reporting
and writing "more efficiently than humans."
The media industry is already beginning to experiment with
AI-generated content. Tech news site CNET used an AI tool similar
to ChatGPT to write dozens of articles — though the publisher has
had to issue a number of corrections — and BuzzFeed has used tech
from the ChatGPT maker to generate new forms of content like
quizzes and travel guides.
But Madgavkar said that the majority of work done by content
creators is not automatable.
"There's a ton of human judgment that goes into each of these
occupations," she said.
Legal industry jobs (paralegals, legal assistants)
paralegal writing document
AI can replicate some of the work that paralegals and legal
assistants do, though they aren't entirely replaceable, experts
say. Worawee Meepian/Shutterstock
Generative AI could impact legal workers in the US, a March
Goldman Sachs report found.
That's because legal services jobs had already been highly exposed
to AI automation before the advent of new AI tools, Manav Raj, an
author of the Goldman study, told Business Insider.
Like media roles, jobs in the legal industry such as paralegals
and legal assistants are responsible for consuming large amounts
of information, synthesizing what they learned, then making it
digestible through a legal brief or opinion.
Language-oriented roles like these are susceptible to automation,
Madgavkar said.
"The data is actually quite structured, very language-oriented,
and therefore quite amenable to generative AI," she added.
But again, AI won't fully be able to automate these jobs since it
requires a degree of human judgement to understand what a client
or employer wants.
"It's almost like a bit of a productivity boost that some of these
occupations might get, because you can use tools that actually do
this better," Madgavkar said.
Market research analysts
Research analyst
Market research analysts are susceptible to AI-driven change, says
an expert. Laurence Dutton/Getty Images
AI is good at analyzing data and predicting outcomes, Muro said.
That is why market research analysts may be susceptible to
AI-driven change.
Market research analysts are responsible for collecting data,
identifying trends within that data, and then using what they
found to design an effective marketing campaign or decide where to
place advertising.
"Those are things that we're now seeing that AI could handle,"
Muro said.
Teachers
Teacher and Schoolgirl Exchanging High-Five in Classroom
Even teachers are susceptible to job disruptions from AI. Getty
Images
Teachers across the country are worried about students using
ChatGPT to cheat on their homework, but according to Pengcheng
Shi, an associate dean in the department of computing and
information sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology, they
should also be thinking about their job security.
ChatGPT "can easily teach classes already," Shi told the New York
Post.
"Although it has bugs and inaccuracies in terms of knowledge, this
can be easily improved," he said. "Basically, you just need to
train the ChatGPT."
But Shannon Ahern, a high school math and science teacher who said
she used ChatGPT to do things like lesson planning, told Business
Insider in March that she's not worried she'll be replaced by the
tech.
"There will always be a need for us and the human connection that
comes with in-person instruction," she said.
Finance jobs (Financial analysts, personal financial advisors)
Couple talking to financial advisor.
Workers in the finance industry could be at risk for AI
replacement, expert says. Getty Images
Like market research analysts, financial analysts, personal
financial advisors, and other jobs in personal finance that
require manipulating significant amounts of numerical data can be
affected by AI, Muro, the researcher at The Brookings Institute,
said.
"AI can identify trends in the market, highlight what investments
in a portfolio are doing better and worse, communicate all that,
and then use various other forms of data by, say, a financial
company to forecast a better investment mix," Muro said.
These analysts make a lot of money, he said, but parts of their
jobs are automatable.
Traders
Traders work on the New York Stock Exchange floor.
Traders work on the New York Stock Exchange floor in New York
City. AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey
Experts say ChatGPT could upend jobs across a range of Wall Street
industries, from trading to investment banking.
"It's going to automate select tasks that knowledge workers are
engaged in today so that they can focus on higher-value tasks,"
Dylan Roberts, a partner at KPMG, told Insider.
Pengcheng Shi, a dean at the Rochester Institute of Technology's
computer science department, agrees that certain Wall Street roles
could be in jeopardy.
"At an investment bank, people are hired out of college, and spend
two, three years to work like robots and do Excel modeling — you
can get AI to do that," Shi told the New York Post.
Graphic designers
Alyssa Nguyen, founder and graphic designer
AI has many graphic design abilities. courtesy of Nguyen
In a Harvard Business Review post published in December 2022,
three professors pointed to DALL-E, an AI tool that can generate
images in seconds, as a potential disruptor of the graphic design
industry.
"Upskilling millions of people in their ability to create and
manipulate images will have a profound impact on the economy,"
they wrote, adding that "these recent advances in AI will surely
usher in a period of hardship and economic pain for some whose
jobs are directly impacted and who find it hard to adapt."
But Dr. Carl Benedikt Frey, an economist at Oxford University,
told Business Insider that AI-tools like ChatGPT may actually help
workers in "creative" industries like art and graphic design
produce higher quality work. Frey said he is more concerned about
how the tech will impact wages.
"In my view, it's less about automation," he said. "It's more
about democratization and competition, potentially leading to
lower wages for people in some of these professions."
Accountants
An accountant reviews tax paperwork over a laptop with a client.
Accountants may see their jobs at risk because of ChatGPT, experts
say. seb_ra/Getty Images
Accounting is generally viewed as a stable profession, but even
employees in this industry could be at risk.
"Technology hasn't put everybody out of a job yet, but it does put
some people out of a job," Brett Caraway, associate professor with
the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and
Technology at the University of Toronto, said on Global News Radio
640 Toronto in January 2023.
Caraway added that "intellectual labor" in particular could be
threatened.
"This could be lawyers, accountants," he said. "It is something
new, and it will be interesting to see just how disruptive and
painful it is to employment and politics."
Customer service agents
Customer support specialist.
Customer support specialists may lose their jobs to AI, experts
say. Tom Werner/Getty Images
You've probably already experienced calling or chatting with a
company's customer service department and having a robot answer.
ChatGPT and related technologies could continue this trend.
A 2022 study from the tech research company Gartner predicted that
chatbots will be the main customer service channel for roughly 25%
of companies by 2027.
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Casino
Capitalism and the Derivatives Market: Time for Another ‘Lehman
Moment’?
Reading
the tea leaves for the 2024 economy is challenging. On January 5th,
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said we haveachieved
a “soft landing,” with wages rising faster than prices in
2023. Butcritics
are questioningthe official figures,
and prices are still high. Surveys show thatconsumers
remain apprehensive.
There
are other concerns. On Dec. 24, 2023,Catherine
Herridge, a senior investigative correspondent for CBS
News covering national security and intelligence, said on “Face
the Nation,” “I just feel a lot of concern that 2024 may
be the year of a black swan event. This is a national security
event with high impact that’s very hard to predict.”
What
sort of event she didn’t say, but speculations have included amajor
cyberattack; abanking
crisisdue to a wave of defaults from
high interest rates, particularly in commercial real estate; anoil
embargodue to war. Any major black swan
could prick the massive derivatives bubble, which the Bank for
International Settlements put atover
one quadrillion (1,000 trillion) dollarsas
far back as 2008. Withglobal
GDPat only $100 trillion, there is not
enough money in the world to satisfy all these derivative
claims. A derivative crisis helped trigger the 2008 banking
collapse, and that could happen again.
The
dangers of derivatives have been known for decades.Warren
Buffett wrote in 2002that they were
“financial weapons of mass destruction.”James
Rickards wroteinU.S.
News & World Reportin 2012 that
they should be banned. Yet Congress has not acted. This article
looks at the current derivative threat, and at what might
motivate our politicians to defuse it.
What
Regulation Hath Wrought
Derivatives
are basically just bets, which are sold as “insurance” —
protection against changes in interest rates or exchange rates,
defaults on loans and the like. When one of the parties to the
wager has a real economic interest to be protected – e.g. a
farmer ensuring the value of his autumn crops against loss — the
wager is considered socially valuable “hedging.” But most
derivative bets today are designed simply to make money from
other traders, degenerating into what has been called “casino
capitalism.”
In
2008,derivative
trading brought downinvestment bank
Bear Stearns and international insurer A.I.G. Both institutions
could not be allowed to fail, because the trillions of dollars
in credit default swaps on their books would have been wiped
out, forcing their counterparty banks and financial institutions
to write down the value of their own risky and now “unhedged”
loans. Bear and A.I.G. werebailed
outby the taxpayers; but the Treasury
drew the line at Lehman Brothers, and the market crashed.
Under
the rubric of “no more bailouts,”the
Dodd Frank Act of 2010purported to fix
the problem by giving derivatives special privileges. Most
creditors are “stayed” from enforcing their rights while a firm
is in bankruptcy, but many derivative contracts are exempt from
these stays. Counterparties owed collateral can grab it
immediately without judicial review, before bankruptcy
proceedings even begin. Depositors become “unsecured creditors”
who can recover their funds only after derivative, repo and
other secured claims, assuming there is anything left to
recover, which in the event of a major derivative crisis would
be unlikely. We saw this“bail-in”
policyplay out in Cyprus in 2013.
That’s
true for deposits, but what of stocks, bonds and money market
funds? Under the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) and the
Bankruptcy Act of 2005,derivative
securities also enjoy special protections. “Safe harbor”
is provided to privileged entities described in court documents
as “the protected class.” Derivatives enjoy “netting” and
“close-out” privileges on the theory that they are a major
source of systemic risk, and that allowing claimants to jump
ahead of other investors in order to net and close out their
bets reduces that risk. However,critical
analysis has shownthat derivative
“super-priority” in bankruptcy can actually increase risk and
propel otherwise viable financial entities into insolvency.
In
the United States, publicly traded stock does not exist in
private hands.
It
is not owned by the ostensible owners, who, by virtue of
having purchased shares in this or that company, are led to
believe they actually own the shares. Technically, all they
own are IOUs. The true ownership lies elsewhere.
While
private-company stock is still directly owned by shareholders,
nearly all publicly traded equities and a majority of bonds
are owned by a little-known partnership, Cede & Co., which
is the nominee of the Depository Trust Co., a depository that
holds securities for some 600 broker-dealers and banks. For
each security, Cede & Co. owns a master certificate known
as the “global security,” which never leaves its vault.
Transactions are recorded as debits and credits to DTC
members’ securities accounts, but the registered owner of the
securities — Cede & Co. — remains the same.
What
shareholders have rather than direct ownership, then, “is a
[contractual] right against their broker…. The broker then has
a right against the depository institution where they have
membership. Then the depository institution is beholden to the
issuer. It’s [at least] a three-step process before you get
any rights to your stock.”This attenuation
of property rights has made it impossible to keep
perfect track of who owns what.
Fifty
Years of “Dematerialization”
In
a 2023 book calledThe
Great Taking(available for free
online), Wall Street veteran David Rogers Webb traces the
legislative history of these developments. The rules go back 50
years, to when trading stocks and bonds was done by physical
delivery – shuffling paper certificates bearing titles in the
names of the purchasers from office to office. In the 1970s,
this trading became so popular that the exchanges could not keep
up, prompting them to turn to “dematerialization” or
digitalization of the assets. TheDepository
Trust Company (DTC)was formed in 1973
to alleviate the rising volumes of paperwork. The DTCC was
established in 1999 as a holding company to combine the DTC and
the National Securities Clearing Corporation (NSCC).
The
DTCC is a central clearing counterparty (CCP) sitting at the top
of a pyramid of banks, brokers and exchanges. All have agreed to
hold their customers’ assets in “street name,” collect those
assets in a fungible pool, and forward that pool to the DTCC,
which then trades pooled blocks of stock and bonds between
brokers and banks in the name of its nominee Cede & Co. The
DTCC, a private corporation, owns them all. This is not a mere
technicality.Courts
have upheldits legal ownership, even ina
dispute with client purchasers.According
to the DTCC website, it provides settlement services for
virtually all equity, corporate and municipal debt trades and
money market instruments in the U.S., and central safekeeping
and asset servicing for securities issues from 131 countries and
territories, valued at $37.2 trillion. In 2022 alone, the DTCC
processed2.5
quadrillion dollars in securities.
The
governing regulations are set out in Uniform Commercial Code
(UCC) sections 8 and 9, covering investment securities and
secured transactions. The UCC is a set of rules produced by
private organizations without an act of Congress. It is not
itself the law but is only a recommendation of the laws that
states should adopt; but the UCC has now been adopted by all 50
U.S. states and has been “harmonized” with the rules for trading
securities in Europe and most other countries.
The
rights created through these links [up the collateral chain]
are purely contractual claims …. This decomposition of
the rights organized by Article 8 of the UCC results in
preventing the investor to revindicate [demand
or take back] the security in case of bankruptcy of the
account provider [the broker or bank], that is to say the
possibility to claim the security as its own asset, without
being obliged to share it at its prorate value with the other
creditors of the account provider.
You,
the investor, have only a contractual claim against your broker,
who no longer holds title to your stock either, since title has
been transferred up the chain to the DTCC. Your contractual
claim is only to a pro rata share of a pool of the stock
designated in street name, title to which is held by Cede &
Co.
Rehypothecation:
The Problem of Multiple Owners
TheWikipediaentry
adds:
This
re-characterization of the proprietary right into a simple
contractual right may enable the account provider [the
“intermediary” broker or bank] to “re-use” the security
without having to ask for the authorization of the investor.
This is especially possible within the framework of temporary
operations such as security
lending, option
to repurchase, buy
to sell back or repurchase
agreement.
“Security
lending” by your broker or other intermediary may include
lending your stock to short sellers bent on bringing down the
value of the stock against your own financial interests.Illegal
naked short selling is also facilitatedby
the impenetrable shield of the DTCC, and so is lending to
“shadow banks” for the re-use of collateral. As Caitlin Long,
another Wall Street veteran,explains:
[T]he
shadow banking system’s lifeblood is collateral, and the
issue is that market players re-use that same collateral over,
and over, and over again, multiple times a day, to create
credit. The process is called “rehypothecation.”
Multiple parties’ financial statements therefore report that
they own the very same asset at the same time. They have
IOUs from each other to pay back that asset—hence, a chain of
counterparty exposure that’s hard to track. Although
improving, there’s still little visibility into how long these
“collateral
chains” are.
It
is this reuse of the collateral to back multiple speculative
bets that has facilitated the explosion of the derivatives
bubble to ten times the GDP of the world. It should be the
collateral of the actual purchaser, but you, the purchaser, are
at the bottom of the collateral chain. Derivative claims have
super priority in bankruptcy, ostensibly because the derivative
edifice is so risky that their bets need to be cleared.
What
About the “Customer Protection Rule”?
Broker-dealers
argue that their customers’ assets are protected under the
“Customer Protection Rule” of the Securities Investor Protection
Corporation (SIPC). The SIPC provides insurance for stocks
similar to FDIC insurance for bank deposits, maintaining a pool
that can be tapped in the event of a member bankruptcy. But a
2008memorandum
on The Customer Protection Rulefrom
the law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher asserts:
With
respect to cash and securities not registered in the name of
the customer, but held by the broker- dealer for the
customer’s benefit, the customer would receive a pro rata
portion of the aggregate amount of the cash and securities
actually held by the broker- dealer. If there is a remaining
shortfall, SIPC would cover a maximum of $ 500,000, only $
100,000 of which may be a recovery for cash held at the
broker- dealer.
…
[M]ost securities are held by broker-dealers in street name
and would be available to satisfy other customers’ claims in
the event of a broker- dealer’s insolvency.
If
the member has a large derivatives book (JPMorgan
holds$54.4 trillion in derivatives and
a mere $3.4 trillion in assets), derivative customers with
priority could wipe out the pool and the SIPC fund as well.
What
Webb worries about, however, is the bankruptcy of the DTCC
itself, which could wipe out the entire collateral chain. He
says the DTCC is clearly under-capitalized, and that the startup
of a new Central Clearing Counterparty is already planned and
pre-funded. If the DTCC fails, certain protected creditors can
take all the collateral, upon which they will have perfected
legal control.
Defensive
Measures
In
the event of a cyberattack that destroys the records of banks
and brokers, there could be no way for purchasers to prove title
to their assets; and in the event of a second Great Depression,
with a wave of 1930s-style bank bankruptcies, derivative
claimants with super-priority can take the banks’ assets without
going through bankruptcy proceedings. In today’s fragile
economy, these are not remote hypotheticals but are real
possibilities, which can wipe out not just the savings of middle
class families but the fortunes of billionaires.
And
there, argues Webb, is our opportunity. The system by which Cede
& Co. holds title to all “dematerialized” securities is
clearly vulnerable to being exploited by “the protected class,”
and Congress could mitigate those concerns by legislation. If
our representatives realized that they are not the owners of
record of their assets but are merely creditors of their brokers
and banks, they might be inspired to hold some hearings and take
action.
The
first step is to shine a light on the obscure hidden workings of
the system and the threat they pose to our personal holdings.
Popular pressure moves politicians, and the people are waking up
to many issues globally, withprotests
on the rise everywhere— economic,
political and social. Possible action that could be taken by
Congress includesreversing
the “special privileges”granted to the
derivatives casino in the form of “super priority” in
bankruptcy. A0.1%
Tobin tax or financial transaction taxis
another possibility. For protecting title to assets, blockchain
is a promising tool, as discussed by Brian Eha in theAmerican
Bankerarticle quoted above. These and
other federal possibilities, along with potential solutions at
the local level, will be the subject of a followup article.
The relationship between inflation and the U.S. dollar is complex
and influenced by various factors. Here are key considerations when
examining the correlation between inflation and the U.S. dollar:
Interest Rates: Central banks, such as the U.S. Federal Reserve, use
interest rates as a tool to control inflation. Higher interest rates
can attract foreign capital seeking better returns, potentially
strengthening the U.S. dollar. Conversely, lower interest rates may
weaken the dollar but can contribute to higher inflation.
Purchasing Power: Inflation erodes the purchasing power of a
currency over time. When the general price level of goods and
services rises, each unit of currency buys less. This reduction in
purchasing power can lead to a decline in the value of the U.S.
dollar.
Inflation Expectations: Expectations about future inflation can
influence current economic behavior. If individuals and businesses
expect higher inflation, they may adjust their spending and
investment decisions. Central banks often communicate their
inflation targets to manage expectations and stabilize the currency.
Trade Balance: The U.S. dollar's value is influenced by trade
balances. If the U.S. experiences a trade deficit (importing more
than it exports), it can contribute to a weaker dollar. This
imbalance may impact inflation by affecting the cost of imported
goods.
Commodity Prices: Some commodities, such as oil and gold, are priced
in U.S. dollars. Changes in commodity prices can influence inflation
and impact the value of the dollar. For example, a rise in oil
prices can contribute to higher inflation and potentially weaken the
dollar.
Global Economic Conditions: The global economic environment can
affect the U.S. dollar and inflation. Economic uncertainty or crises
in other parts of the world may lead to a flight to safety,
strengthening the dollar. Conversely, robust global economic growth
can contribute to a weaker dollar.
Government Debt and Fiscal Policy: The fiscal policy of the U.S.
government, including levels of government debt and deficit
spending, can impact inflation and the value of the U.S. dollar.
Excessive government debt may raise concerns about inflation,
potentially affecting the currency.
Monetary Policy Actions: The actions taken by the Federal Reserve
and other central banks play a crucial role. When central banks
implement policies to stimulate economic activity, such as
quantitative easing, it can impact inflation expectations and the
value of the U.S. dollar.
It's important to note that these factors interact in a dynamic and
interconnected way, and their impact on the U.S. dollar and
inflation can vary over time. Additionally, currency markets are
influenced by a wide range of geopolitical and economic events,
making it challenging to isolate the impact of any single factor.