AI is transforming the world of work. Is it coming for your job? A new study identifies 82 roles at risk of disruption.
Artificial intelligence is messing up everything. Pope Leo, for example, spitballed the other day about “an instrument of domination, exclusion, and death”.
So there’s that. But for many of us it’s a more banal and immediate question: is the proliferation of this technology – spanning machine learning, generative AI, robotics and automation – about to make us redundant?
New Zealanders seem to be more worried than most. A new Ipsos survey of 32 countries asked about the impact on the job market across the next three to five years. It found 58% of us thought the technology would make things worse, with just 14% saying nah fine. We’re the most pessimistic place in the world.
The findings are consistent with various research pointing to serious levels of AI distrust in New Zealand, said Professor Ali Knott, a specialist in cognitive science and artificial intelligence at Victoria University of Wellington. Any number of factors could contribute to that attitude, he said, but it could be informed by the signals from the top.
The current government had been “fairly evangelical” about AI without simultaneously setting out “the necessary transparency or regulatory mechanisms”, he said. Distrust may also stem from the areas that organisations using AI prioritise. Deloitte NZ’s Human Capital Trends Report, published in April, found that “trust, ethics and data governance risk becoming blind spots”.
New Zealand organisations are placing less emphasis than their international counterparts around the world on “AI ethics, workforce data trustworthiness, and managing AI’s human impacts – areas that become more critical as AI use scales”. Just 50% of New Zealand respondents, compared with 69% globally, rated balancing benefits, risks, ethics and potential conflict in AI as very or extremely important.
That was of particular concern, the report noted, given the unique importance of Māori data sovereignty.
The Ipsos survey was completed before the most recent headlines about AI replacing human work, as advanced by the finance minister, Nicola Willis. She urged public sector workers, who had for too long been “scared of AI”, to embrace the technology to offset the cut in head count demanded by last month’s budget.
The public servants of Lambton Quay are not the only ones worried about the robots. A study published in Australia this month, for example, identified 82 different occupations that face serious disruption. More on that in a moment.
Finance minister Nicola Willis (Photo: Dean Purcell/New Zealand Herald via Getty Images)
What we know and what we don’t
In the US, artificial intelligence is now the main reason cited for cutting jobs. Some of that is real, some of it is “AI washing”, according to many, including Sam Altman. Perhaps the most visible figurehead in artificial intelligence today as the outspoken boss of OpenAI, Altman said in January , “there’s some AI washing where people are blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do, and then there’s some real displacement by AI of different kinds of jobs.”
Back in 2019, Altman had envisioned a scorched earth, saying AI would “probably replace most of the jobs people do today”. Speaking at a Sydney conference last month, however, he said he had overestimated the likely impact, and advances in AI would not lead to the “jobs apocalypse” he had earlier feared.
Whether projecting apocalypse or merely a blizzard, every forecast in this territory needs to come with heavy caveats.
Knott was one of three New Zealand authors of a substantial 2021 study examining the ways that AI is set to impact work and employment. Back then, they were disinclined to make specific predictions of what was to come. After five years, and bearing in mind that Chat GPT was not released until 2022, Knott says he sticks by their approach, of encouraging those designing policy to look at different scenarios from a macro perspective.
“I much prefer the idea of saying we do not know yet, and what we should do instead is formulate different scenarios,” he said. “A lot of AI future tasks are so uncertain that they require fast reactions from government. I think all we can do is organise the possibilities into coherent alternatives, and then say: keep an eye out for this thing or that thing.”
The first was a positive vision in which “there are no widespread job losses, because productivity means that everyone can just do more, and everyone makes more money”. Another imagined “widespread job losses, but with some of the profits from AI remaining onshore, because the productivity, the automation comes from New Zealand-owned companies. If that’s the case, there are immediate options for redistribution of AI profits back to the community, so that you can address the challenge of people who’ve lost their jobs.”
Then there’s the “bad scenario”, said Knott. That imagi…
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