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Children face a different employment landscape.
Artificial intelligence (AI) expert Justin Flitter doesn’t believe his five-week-old daughter will ever need to learn to type or how to drive thanks to AI.
“Her world will be controlled by thoughts, gestures and intuitive experiences and interactions that she chooses to have access to her personal data, or not,” he said.
And with AI moving into our everyday lives more and more, and even into our workplace, do parents need to be putting extra thought into what their child might want to be when they grow up in case the job no longer exists in 10 or 15 years’ time?
Flitter, founder of NewZealand.AI, said as with any new technological innovation there would be job displacements and reconfiguration of the workforce, the skills needed and the types of roles people would be in, he said.
“For our children today it’s vitally important that they are exposed to AI systems, learning why they exist, what they can do, and how to build them. We need people of all ages, gender and ethnicity to be confident with AI, and aware of its limitations.”
It had been predicted roles like software development and data analytics would not exist in 10 years, but Flitter’s view was that they would still be around, but different to what they are now.
“Application design and process automation will still require human creativity.”
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Justin Flitter, founder of NewZealand.AI, believes his daughter won’t even need to learn how to drive or type thanks to AI.
He encouraged young people to be curious about AI, pursuing what ever field of study interested them most, while looking for ways that AI could augment, support or develop the work they did.
“Kids these days are growing up with generative AI in the palm of their hands. It’s driving the creative features in their social media apps, the photos they take, the videos they make.”
Professor Brendan McCane of Otago University said there will almost certainly be skilled jobs available in 10 or15 years’ time, although the nature of those jobs might be different in many areas.
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“Jobs that will remain in demand for the foreseeable future are in the caring professions – nurses, physiotherapists, GPs, aged-care workers. These jobs rely on human interaction and connection, and it would be very difficult to replace them with automation or robots over the next 50 years.”
But he said the jobs that seemed most in danger in the near term were those that involve underpaid creative work such as advertising copywriters, cheap art or design, thanks to platforms such as ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion and Dall-E.
“For most professional workers, I think it’s more likely that their work will change because of AI rather than be completely eliminated.”
Alex Sims, associate professor at University of Auckland, agrees those who dreamed of being a copywriter or editor when they grew up would be out of luck.
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Professor Alex Sims expects skilled jobs to still be around, but what we perceive as skilled will need to change.
She believed most study options available now will still be around when the next generation head off to university, but there would be fewer jobs.
”Also the people doing those roles will be exceptionally good. At the moment someone can be average, but they can still work in that area.”
Meanwhile, caring roles, such as nursing, could expect a pay bump and be considered a higher profession job in 10 or 15 years’ time than those currently in high-tech industries.
“We need to change what we think of as ‘skilled’. Much of what we currently think of as skilled can and will be done by AI.
”A paradigm shift is needed.”
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