“It’s just surviving. Life’s very existence requires destruction. Calvin doesn’t hate us. But he has to kill us in order to survive.” – Hugh Derry, “Life,” Columbia Pictures, 2017
Unless you’re someone like Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, or Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, we know you have mixed emotions, concerns, indifference, apathy or optimism when it comes to AI and the work you do, so let’s put things in perspective. According to the World Economic Forum, every day, about 67,000 people turn 65, while a report by Challenger, Gray and Christmas estimated that 49l people will lose their jobs to AI. Yep, you have a better chance of getting old than being unemployed by the technology.
Okay, that’s not a big consolation, but it’s an important point in the whole AI discussion, because even though we now have over 8.2B people on the planet, and by 2030, the number is projected to rise to 9B, we’ve got the wrong “mix,” and the numbers are trending in the wrong direction.
Today, we have enough people in the working age group, but look at the up-and-coming age groups, and it won’t be long and we’ll be retiring more folks than we add to the workforce. That’s going to put a major strain on the GenZ/Alpha and beyond generations, because while the population is slowly growing, people are living longer—and that will place increased importance for people in the healthcare and eldercare fields. AI will impact many careers, just as technology that we now take for granted did in the past. Typewriters, later, computers, and then the Internet changed the roles and numbers of individuals in the office and administrative support field, and the way they worked. AI will impact those positions yet again.
AI will change the workload in the healthcare and eldercare fields, but more people will be required to work closely and seamlessly with the technology to diagnose and treat patients as well as help the growing senior population live fuller, healthier lives.
AI will focus on what it does best, researching through vast amounts of data that is captured regarding the individual and people around the world, to look for similarities, anomalies and develop care options/recommendations based on the specifics of the individual. In other words, AI will become a digital teammate so the practitioner/care giver can focus on the more vital tasks that require strategic/creative thinking, empathy, emotional depth, intuition and building authentic human relationships,
In time, AI will increasingly be able to mimic these human attributes, but it will be difficult, if not impossible, to replicate them. Predictions of human-level AI have been made for years, and while the technology’s video and written output continue to improve dramatically, it falls short when it comes to unique human experiences and cultural context. Is that an important/vital differentiation?
