A decade ago, the “gurus” of new technology – Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and the like – were encouraging young people to learn code instead of a foreign language. Learning the “language” of computers, they said, would secure them a well-paid job for life.
Artificial intelligence has proved the “experts” wrong. You no longer need to be a programmer to give the machine instructions so it can carry out a specific task. You can just describe what the task is to ChatGPT or Claude and AI will write all the code you need to feed into the machine within a few short minutes.
In other words, a profession that was highly sought after only a few years ago has, to a significant extent, been displaced by AI. The same, it is argued, will happen in the coming years over a wide range of occupations that are not manual but rely on some form of cognitive work. Jobs centered on processing information, images, text, numbers and data are increasingly being taken over by artificial intelligence. In its current forms, AI serves as an assistant; before long, though – perhaps within as little as five years – it may become a substitute for the human worker, who will have to seek employment elsewhere.
Consider the implications. Secretarial and administrative support services, routine legal work, tax advisory and accounting services, content drafting, financial analysis, computer programming, application development and even certain forms of medical test assessment are likely to become the exclusive domain of AI in the near future.
