At Least Plumbers and Electricians Will Still Have Jobs! By Brian Simpson
OpenAI's new multimodal model, GTP-4o, is set to use Artificial intelligence to take away even more jobs, given its advances in voice and vision capacities. Any job that has data will be impacted upon by this model, and more is to come. This knocks over the cynical reply given by the technocrats to this unemployment scenario, "just learn coding." Most future coding will be done by AI anyway, so these geeks will be replaced as well. As for the few surviving blue-collar jobs, robots to do manual labour are in a rapid advance as well.
What to do? The first step is to start to think critically about technology in general, its point and justification. Not being aware of what the technocrats are up to is a social death sentence.
"OpenAI's newest model and others like it could dramatically reinvent the workplace wheel.
GPT-4o, the company's newest multimodal model, can input and output a combination of text, audio, and images. The technology represents a major advancement of the artificial intelligence of the recent past.
OpenAI announced the model in a series of demo videos on Monday, showcasing the technology's improved vision and voice abilities. The videos elicited both wonder and mockery, with people quickly making comparisons to the 2013 sci-fi movie "Her" and Elon Musk saying the reveal made him "cringe."
It's too early to predict how exactly the model will disrupt the workforce, but Maribel Lopez, an AI analyst who founded the research and strategy consulting firm Lopez Research, said GPT-4o and other multimodal models would inevitably change the way we work.
"The concept of multimodal models will impact a lot of different industries because it handles text, video, and audio," Lopez told Business Insider.
But not all of those impacts would necessarily be negative, Lopez said. For example, electricians, plumbers, and other manual workers could use multimodal AI to make their jobs easier, she said.
"For workers who fix specialized equipment, AI might be very helpful in troubleshooting or fixing problems," Lopez said. "But it won't replace them because they have to be there to do it."
While some companies are working on AI robots that can do physical work, those models are typically better suited for repeated menial tasks such as welding bolts than complex blue-collar labor.
Other industries, however, could have more of a challenge adapting to the implementation of multimodal AI in the workplace.
"AI will impact any job that has data," Lopez said, pointing to industries such as supply chains and finance.
Lopez said the consensus was that anywhere from 20% to 30% of tasks completed by "computer workers" would eventually be offset by AI. But that doesn't mean computer workers will find themselves unemployed.
Using paralegals as an example, Lopez said their jobs could shift from tracking down documents and writing up summaries — two tasks that can take a person hours but which AI can complete in minutes — to tasks yet unknown.
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