You’ve probably heard the story: A young buck comes into a new job full of confidence, and the weathered older worker has to show them the ropes—only to find out they’ll be unemployed once the new employee is up to speed. This has been happening among humans for a long time—but it may soon start happening between humans and artificial intelligence.
Countless headlines over the years have warned that automation isn’t just coming for blue-collar jobs, but that AI would threaten scores of white-collar jobs as well. AI tools are becoming capable of automating tasks and sometimes entire jobs in the corporate world, especially when those jobs are repetitive and rely on processing data. This could affect everyone from workers at banks and insurance companies to paralegals and beyond.
Carl Frey, an economist at Oxford University, coauthored a landmark study in 2013 that claimed AI could threaten nearly 50 percent of US jobs in the coming decades. Frey says that he doesn’t think new AI tools like ChatGPT are going to automate jobs in this way because they still require human involvement and are often unreliable. Still, many of the underlying factors that were outlined in that paper remain pertinent today. Considering the rapid pace at which AI is advancing, it’s hard to predict how it could soon be utilized and what it will be capable of.
Then there’s the issue of how it’s being incorporated into daily work and how it’s being trained. Enter corporate spyware, invasive monitoring apps that allow bosses to keep close tabs on everything their employees are doing—collecting reams of data that could come into play here in interesting ways. Corporations, which are monitoring their employees on a large scale, are now having workers utilize AI tools more frequently, and many questions remain regarding how the many AI tools that are currently being developed are being trained.
Put all of this together and there’s the potential that companies could use data they’ve harvested from workers—by monitoring them and having them interact with AI that can learn from them—to develop new AI programs that could actually replace them. If your boss can figure out exactly how you do your job, and an AI program is learning from the data you’re producing, then eventually your boss might be able to just have the program do the job instead.
“When it comes to monitoring workflows, I do think that’s going to be a way we automate a lot of this stuff,” Frey says. “What you might be able to do is take some of those foundational models and train them on some of the data you have internally and fine-tune them, or you could train a model from scratch just with your internal data.”
David Autor, a professor of economics at MIT, says he also thinks AI could be trained in this way. While there is a lot of employee surveillance happening in the corporate world, and some of the data that’s collected from it could be used to help train AI programs, simply learning from how people are interacting with AI tools throughout the workday could help train those programs to replace workers.
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