The artificial intelligence revolution will change the jobs market, but it will have an overwhelmingly positive impact on people and work, according to executives at the CES technology show.
The annual convention in Las Vegas is being dominated by products and services claiming to have AI tools at their centre, but some critics of the technology have raised concerns that its automation capabilities will take away jobs from humans.
But senior figures in the tech sector have argued the aim is not to replace humans at work but help improve their working lives by augmenting certain tasks to allow them to focus on other things both professionally and personally.
Gary Shapiro, chief executive of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), which organises CES, told the PA news agency that as AI reshapes industries, jobs and skillsets will also evolve and new opportunities will emerge.
“Certainly it will have an impact on jobs, both positively and negatively. The positive is that it will take away from humans a lot of jobs that are repetitive and that humans don’t want to do – and it will give us longer and healthier lives. It will have cars avoiding car accidents and save us a lot of human misery, but new human skills will be needed to create new jobs,” he said.
“For example, in the auto industry as we move to self-driving – which is generative AI in part – you will have jobs creating new environments and cars. It will create ‘sleeping cars’ that you can buy or rent. It will have entertainment or education, you name it.
“They’ll be new business models, and people have to clean cars and things like that – those services will develop. The rental car markets will change. Those are good things. They’ll be different jobs out there.
“People will have more leisure time, and you’ll find new ways to fill it. I think people have a fundamental need to be productive and helpful.”
Earlier this week, Sam Altman, the boss of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, said the company was confident it could already create what is known as artificial general intelligence – an advanced level of AI defined by OpenAI as one which can autonomously outperform humans in most forms of work.
Mr Altman said he believed early forms of this technology could even start to appear this year to “join the workforce and materially change the output of companies”.
Meanwhile, CES has been littered with demonstrations from firms looking to deploy AI to make home appliances more useful and helpful autonomously.
Deborah Honig, chief customer officer at Samsung UK, said the tech giant was focused on tools to streamline people’s tasks.
In the last 12 months, the firm has introduced a series of AI features for its mobile devices that can help users better organise their emails and calendars as well as writing and editing tools, and at CES has announced it is bringing AI to its TVs to make them central smart home hubs for households.
“There’s no doubt that AI is going to transform everything about how we live and work, which means it’s going to have a transformational impact on the types of jobs, the types of tasks and the roles that we perform over the next few years,” Ms Honig told PA.
“I think within Samsung, what we really have seen and believe is that it’s there to enhance what you do not replace, and the shift out of some of the more routine tasks gives you the time to do some of the things you never get to, or the higher value tasks that you were looking to do.
“It’s not so much for us replacing, but augmenting, and that’s at least what we see and what we intend by it.”
She added that the increasing presence of AI tools in daily life could also help “level the playing field” when it came to work-life balance, in particular for women, but also younger people starting out in life.
“When I think about things like levelling the playing field – we know that women in most homes have an extra burden that they spend doing what we call unpaid labour – helping manage the home – and personally, as someone who’s doing career and family, being able to remove those hours just by having tools that automate things so you don’t have to feel like you’re making a choice between the quality of life and what you’re doing for your family and the quality of your work and your professional life, I think its exactly what we’ve been looking for,” she said.
“So in that context, from making it possible to have an equal place in work and home, to smaller businesses or younger people starting up and not being able to afford to take expensive courses or use expensive agencies to create their first marketing tools or the support they need to launch their business idea, I feel like AI can provide all of that.”