Will Your Job be Overtaken by AI?

How to embrace innovation without losing your job

Ric Edelman: It's Wednesday, March 29th. Yesterday I talked about the need for you to rethink how you're handling college for your kids and your advice for your clients if you're an advisor helping people with their college planning. Did you hear that podcast? Sal did. He just emailed me this morning saying, "Ric, you knocked the cover off with that podcast. I'm literally sending the show link to everyone I know. Kudos". Hey, thanks, Sal. I appreciate that. Hey, if you missed that podcast yesterday, the link is in the show notes.  

And if you need more convincing that the degree you're planning to get is worthless, well, you've been hearing a lot about ChatGPT, haven't you? That's a chat bot that writes term papers. It even passed the bar exam and now the company that makes it says 80% of US jobs are going to be impacted by this new software. That's because ChatGPT and other programs like it are all about artificial intelligence, and they're going to be able to write code, do math with more accuracy and consistency. Your boss is going to pay for the software to do your job instead of hiring you to do it.  

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania say 80% of the workforce are going to have 10% of their tasks replaced by GPT. 20% of the workers are going to have half of their job replaced. What are the occupations that are most at risk? Mathematicians. Tax preparers. Writers. Web designers. Accountants. Journalists. Legal secretaries. Those least at risk: Graphic designers. Marketers. Financial managers. Blue collar will be less at risk than white collar. GPT is software. It's not going to impact many people on the manufacturing line or in agriculture or forestry jobs.  

In my book, The Truth About Your Future, I gave you the full list of occupations that are going to disappear because of AI, like ChatGPT. I said then that it was coming. I wrote that book in 2017. Now here we are six years later and it's arrived. There's a link in the show notes if you want to get a copy of my book from Amazon. And while some white-collar jobs are safe from GPT - healthcare education, for example, how those people are going to do those jobs, you might not lose your job as a teacher or a nurse, but how you do your job is going to change a lot.  

In healthcare, researchers might let GPT write their papers for them. Real estate agents are already doing this. They're using ChatGPT to write listings and social media posts and calculate mortgage payments. In education, college professors are already saying they are no longer going to have their students write term papers. I mean, why bother? You assign your students a term paper. They're just going to go to their dorms, log on to ChatGPT and have the software write the term paper. The professors will never know if the students cheated or not. So the answer is, they’re not going to have the kids write term papers anymore.  

This is huge and it's going to get bigger. Microsoft has invested $10 billion in OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT. Prakash Patni, who is the managing director of digital transformation at IBM, says the banking industry is about to experience a huge rate of innovation because of this technology. Not just artificial intelligence, but also crypto, 5G, quantum computing and the metaverse.  

Gartner says by 2026, 25% of people around the world are going to spend at least an hour a day in the metaverse. You're going to work there, shop there. You're going to go to school there. You'll socialize there. $120 billion was invested in the metaverse last year alone. McKinsey says it's going to be a $5 trillion market by the end of the decade. And so Disney and other companies now have a chief metaverse officer.  

This AI is so powerful, it's already being used to race cars at the Indy Autonomous Challenge this year. Nine teams from six countries raced cars that hit 180 miles an hour. Now, if AI can do this for cars on a racetrack, are you really telling me that AI is not going to be able to operate your car on a highway? You'll just tell it where you want to go and it'll take you there. This technology is even coming to clothing. Smart bracelets, rings, watches, glasses, all connected to our smartphones by Bluetooth wearable tech features. Sensors will monitor our health and activity tracks our temperature, blood pressure, glucose levels, heart rate and oxygen levels. It can help first responders if we're in an accident or we fall ill with a heart attack. It can help rescuers find people in a disaster.  

Many of these products are already on the market. Zegna sells solar powered jackets that keep you warm and power your devices. Hexoskin Socks measure your heart rate and calories, along with how many steps you're walking and the volume. It can help warn you if your running technique will lead to an injury.  

And did you hear about the attorney this past Christmas who was kicked out of Radio City Music Hall? She's a mom and her daughter is a Girl Scout. She took the whole troop to see the Rockettes. And when she walked through the doors with the kids, the Radio City Music hall's cameras used facial recognition to determine her identity. Security guards walked up to her, asked for her ID, confirmed who she was, and told her to leave.  

Why? Because the cameras, using facial recognition technology used artificial intelligence to identify her as a lawyer. Not just any lawyer, but a lawyer working for a law firm that's representing a client that is suing MSG Entertainment, the owner of Radio City Music Hall. This is not merely the future. This is already here. And what is the future? There's an international team of scientists being led by Johns Hopkins. They're working on a biological computer powered by brain cells. They say their machine will outperform today's computers using far less energy. They call it intelligence in a dish. And it's going to be able to learn, remember, and interact with its environment and they say, it could develop consciousness.   

You think ChatGPT is a big deal? You ain't seen nothing yet. The future is not only coming, it's coming with astonishing speed. And you need to think really seriously about what it is you're going to have your child study when they go to college. Are they going to be focusing on a degree in a field that literally won't exist in 10 years? And you're going to let them spend a couple of hundred thousand dollars and six years of their life pursuing that degree that's not going to exist in 10 years? You need to really seriously rethink the college planning strategy. Listen to yesterday's podcast. Hit rewind and re-listen to today's.  

One more thing, let me ask you this. Do you watch or listen to this podcast on YouTube? If you do leave a comment for me, just like Sal did, let me know what you think. Here's one that I got from Kay Clover. He said that my March 14th podcast, where I covered what happened to Silicon Valley Bank, he said, "Ric it was the best explanation I have yet heard on what happened". Hey, that's really great to hear. I appreciate it. Glad you liked it. If you'd like to leave a YouTube comment, you can do so. The link to the channel is in today's show notes.  

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