I wish this article went into more detail about "The AI threat to roles traditionally performed by women."
From my vantage point, it seems "pink collar" and other jobs where woman are traditionally overrepresented are labor-intensive in ways that just aren't especially easy to automate. The Kenan Institute study they link to highlights jobs in education, healthcare, and office and administrative support but again, elides much detail about how AI would supplant those jobs.
I actually agree that office and admin jobs are – and, in fact, have been – automated, but I'm pretty skeptical that AI will completely supplant or destroy roles in healthcare, education, and social work. I could see AI being super beneficial in those occupations, though, so it definitely behooves people to learn to use generative AI.
Just a personal anecdote but I'm in writing/editing and on a team of 40 people maybe 5 are men. Jobs like nursing still involve a lot of "manual labor" that AI can't replace, but a job like mine...AI probably won't fully replace writers anytime soon, but if they make writers 5 times faster, a company needs 1/5th as many writers to get the same work done and my team of 40 shrinks to a team of 8 while 32 people seek unemployment.
I actually work in content marketing and am a writer/editor myself. The \*really\* ironic thing is that, since I work for a data technology company, a lot of my writing has lately been about generative AI...
I think there \*could\* be a risk to writers, especially in industries that are declining and where there already isn't enough work to go around. Where I'm situated, though, there's no shortage of work to do and making writers 5x more productive would just mean the company has more resources and can iterate faster. In the end it almost certainly depends on the particulars of a situation.
To the extent that anyone has studied this systematically, there is preliminary evidence that generative AI makes low-performers much more capable and has modest effects on high performers. See [this blog post](https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/is-it-time-for-the-revenge-of-the) under the header "Generative AI is a power tool for the mind," which lists several studies to the effect.
We certainly have more work than we can handle right now, but we also just laid off half a dozen people recently. My company is in the late corporate cost cutting phase, and I absolutely believe they would and are actively trying to use AI to reduce their labor costs. Fortunately it hasn't really made anyone much faster yet. As long as there is more work than workers people are safe.
And, maybe I'm being cynical, but if someone brand new to editing can use AI to be just as good as I am at my job, why would they pay me twice as much to do it?
AI nursing software is going to significantly reduce the number of nurses. https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/nvidia-announces-ai-powered-health-care-agents-outperform-nurses-cost-9-hour.amp
AI is only going to become more relevant over the years so it's important to consider how it can reinforce and amplify existing prejudices, for example against women.
The main thing to remember is AI can only do what it's told to do. So if it's men doing most of the telling, it's right to be suspicious.
Ann Reardon (How to Cook That on YouTube) recently posted about gender bias in algorithms, and part of the video touched on automated screening of resumes. Short version: women were getting screened out, even when the humans told the robots to stop doing it.
Holy cow, I was just remarking to my friend that all my YouTube subscriptions are women (either women's medical health or crafting, I love you Morgan Donner and Caitlin Doughty) but all the recommended channels and newly uploaded videos I received are videos by males. Even YouTube is against me decentering men, I joked. But it's real!
My feed has also seen a lot of “male creep” lately. Mama Doctor Jones and HTCT are channels I watch regularly, and they’ve been MIA unless I search for them, as have the female reactors I also watch more regularly. Instead, YT pushes a lot of white dude reactors and channels I would never watch, for whatever reason.
Then you have guy-run channels like Dr. Mike and Tasting History, which I do watch occasionally, but somehow they’re still all up in my feed even though I watch them less than MDJ and HTCT and those female reactors.
Go figure, right? I’m sure there’s nooooothing to see here.
It’s important to know that that Amazon tool was never actually launched. They discovered the bias while evaluating it offline and, as a result, shut down the project before it was ever used.
This seems to be more of a case that men do jobs that are less likely to be relevant to generative AI; as in more physical and less cerebral work. It’s actually directly stated in the study that the article refers to.
“This is due to the affected occupations being populated by more women than men”
Obviously this is a big issue, but I'm not sure how to feel about this article... Like, is this specifically a "generative AI" problem, or a general "companies automating as many jobs as they can in a race to the bottom line" problem? How much of the gender discrepancy is simply the result of female-dominated jobs being dismissed as unskilled and unimportant? The lack of women in STEM is not a new problem. I think this deserves discussion beyond the existence of AI.
I studied "AI" as part of my CS degree, and I can't help but feel people are often clueless about it. Most modern AI is machine learning, where you feed your algorithm a shitload of data and iteratively train it to make sense of it. You get bias because your data comes from a biased world; it's deeper than Joe SoftwareEngineer coding in bigoted rules.
Not all AI is generative (producing text or images). Algorithms that count the numbers of birds in a picture, determine if a webpage is relevant to a search query, or detect whether an image represents cancerous cells, are most likely also machine learning. ChatGPT itself is not magically more intelligent than them. Ultimately, it's a text predictor: what worda are most likely to come next? Thus I'm not sure how it's supposed to be useful to a matchmaker, a landscaper, or whatever. Part of the generative AI rush seems like it's coming from business bros rather than people who actually understand how the tool can be useful.
(Sorry if this is a little confused btw. I'm still half awake haha.)
“You won’t be replaced by AI. You’ll be replaced by someone who has mastered AI.”
So--According to this article, women are not being targeted and consciously replaced. Buy and large they might not be using AI tools in the workplace as much as men, or statistically are in roles that could be replaced by AI tools.
In short, if you are in a job that might be replaced by AI, the best thing to do is educate yourself on how to use it.
Great advice. Even just learning how to create better prompts to get more out of something like ChatGPT is going to be a valuable skill.
It’s like how learning to use the basic functions of excel is a *really* helpful skill most people seem to neglect.
I keep saying this, because no one is talking about it. But if AI is making our art and our music, and is also doing all of our writing for us, we no longer have human culture, only AI culture. It's one thing to put AI to work doing service work, but creative and intellectual work should not be done by AI. I'm not even sure it's a good idea to use AI for anything at all. But the number of lawyers who have been caught using it scares me. We can not afford to automate our criminal justice system or we will be ruled by AI as well.
With the state of robotics and how fast AI develops (I'm at an elite uni where these things are done/researched) I cannot come up with any job that could not be replaced. None. This is going to happen soon. Over the next 10 years or so.
No idea how capitalism is supposed to work like that but others here are right. It will very likely not lead to an egalitarian paradise, probably the opposite.
I don't know about 10 years.
10 years ago from today, people were saying: In 10 years all cars will be driverless, and truck drivers won't exist as a job anymore. It hasn't happened yet, and how long will it take? Another 10 years, 20? More?
And all manual labor jobs that are not so simple that they can be replaced by a normal (non-AI) machine, face similar problems to driverless cars.
Lower level office jobs and creative jobs will most likely be replaced in high numbers soon, which might be where there's more women than men. Manual labor jobs will take longer, which is where there's more men. And then there's still higher level jobs, like management, which also has more men.
Honestly I think it might be another 50 years or more, until a large part of all jobs will be replaced. I might be wrong.
I disagree. Have you seen what robots can do?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e1\_QhJ1EhQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e1_QhJ1EhQ) THis is from almost 1 1/2 years ago.
Keep in mind, a robot works 24/7. You do not have to pay them, then can be quickly repaired or replaced. They do not get sick or injured or pregnant. The prices for them are also dropping really fast.
The moment AI can be combined with the current state of robotics everything could be on the chopping block.
One driver is the quantitative easing policy that somehow is still very much in effect. There are infinite amounts of money and lots of it is going in that direction.
This could go very quick. In the US more than 700.000 employees were cut in the tech sector. UPS has also fired more than 12.000 this year. The next few years are probably going to be somewhat mild but after that. Humans cannot compete with a robot with integrated AI.
And yet they will use massive amounts of energy and will primarily use fossil fuels. That will accelerate warming further as well, which will mean people will not be able to afford protections from an increasingly climate-stressed world.
I suspect AI and robotics automation would be in fact incredibly environmentally friendly if you could kill the workers replaced by AI on the spot. The robots will never book a holiday on a different continent and fly there.
I'd like to see AI working in the field or a greenhouse. It's strange that kids might have to start looking into industries that won't be AI dominated in the future
I can imagine AI might be working those in the future, just not very soon.
There's already harvesting machines etc. If those get better both mechanically, and then also use AI, they could work a whole greenhouse alone. Visually recognize where the plant is, where the fruit is, where the weeds are, if it needs water or is ripe yet etc. And then accurately cut/water/pluck the plant etc.
I don't know... the robotics we have still has ages to go. I've seen those field robot prototypes. They look rickety and not reliable. Not to mention - power sources! Like what is going to run all these robots? Oil? Well that'll help the planet. Our reliance on fossil fuels has stymied advancements in renewable energy for like, what a century?
AI greenhouses that constantly monitor and optimize conditions for the crop being grown doesn't sound far-fetched at all.
Compared to something like a self-driving car, it seems like an easier challenge (I am no expert). We have so much existing data on food crops. Convolutional neural networks can recognize visual data pretty accurately if given enough examples.
Yes this is all part of the plan to turn the US into Gilead. If they’re going to put us in breeding camps they need to find a way to replace us in the workforce
Vote accordingly
Oh no I’m fine with robots taking the job as long as we can get UBI, and they’ll have to figure out a way to keep the economy going if robots take the jobs who’s going to buy the crap they are producing?
In that future The big corps would be both the owner of capital and also be the producers of goods(through robot labor). they wouldn't need people anymore. It would be a closed loop.
It would be a dystopian future similar to elysium or blade runner
That won't happen because AI has been used for decades. What *should* happen is heavy regulation and controls over its use, but banning it entirely? Never.
Like every techniclogical disruption, socio-economic status, race, and gender will affect the degree to which this impacts you. So yes, it is important to highlight uneven impacts of AI on the labor market.
>In the US, eight out of 10 women, compared to six out of 10 men, *are in roles* that may be replaced by artificial intelligence
Am I reading this right? It’s about the roles, not gender specifically. Unless US government is firing these women intentionally I don’t think it is anyone’s fault. Some jobs are more prone to be replaced by AI earlier.
I wish this article went into more detail about "The AI threat to roles traditionally performed by women." From my vantage point, it seems "pink collar" and other jobs where woman are traditionally overrepresented are labor-intensive in ways that just aren't especially easy to automate. The Kenan Institute study they link to highlights jobs in education, healthcare, and office and administrative support but again, elides much detail about how AI would supplant those jobs. I actually agree that office and admin jobs are – and, in fact, have been – automated, but I'm pretty skeptical that AI will completely supplant or destroy roles in healthcare, education, and social work. I could see AI being super beneficial in those occupations, though, so it definitely behooves people to learn to use generative AI.
Just a personal anecdote but I'm in writing/editing and on a team of 40 people maybe 5 are men. Jobs like nursing still involve a lot of "manual labor" that AI can't replace, but a job like mine...AI probably won't fully replace writers anytime soon, but if they make writers 5 times faster, a company needs 1/5th as many writers to get the same work done and my team of 40 shrinks to a team of 8 while 32 people seek unemployment.
I actually work in content marketing and am a writer/editor myself. The \*really\* ironic thing is that, since I work for a data technology company, a lot of my writing has lately been about generative AI... I think there \*could\* be a risk to writers, especially in industries that are declining and where there already isn't enough work to go around. Where I'm situated, though, there's no shortage of work to do and making writers 5x more productive would just mean the company has more resources and can iterate faster. In the end it almost certainly depends on the particulars of a situation. To the extent that anyone has studied this systematically, there is preliminary evidence that generative AI makes low-performers much more capable and has modest effects on high performers. See [this blog post](https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/is-it-time-for-the-revenge-of-the) under the header "Generative AI is a power tool for the mind," which lists several studies to the effect.
We certainly have more work than we can handle right now, but we also just laid off half a dozen people recently. My company is in the late corporate cost cutting phase, and I absolutely believe they would and are actively trying to use AI to reduce their labor costs. Fortunately it hasn't really made anyone much faster yet. As long as there is more work than workers people are safe. And, maybe I'm being cynical, but if someone brand new to editing can use AI to be just as good as I am at my job, why would they pay me twice as much to do it?
AI nursing software is going to significantly reduce the number of nurses. https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/nvidia-announces-ai-powered-health-care-agents-outperform-nurses-cost-9-hour.amp
AI is only going to become more relevant over the years so it's important to consider how it can reinforce and amplify existing prejudices, for example against women. The main thing to remember is AI can only do what it's told to do. So if it's men doing most of the telling, it's right to be suspicious.
We’ve seen this with the Amazon recruiting tool..
Ann Reardon (How to Cook That on YouTube) recently posted about gender bias in algorithms, and part of the video touched on automated screening of resumes. Short version: women were getting screened out, even when the humans told the robots to stop doing it.
Holy cow, I was just remarking to my friend that all my YouTube subscriptions are women (either women's medical health or crafting, I love you Morgan Donner and Caitlin Doughty) but all the recommended channels and newly uploaded videos I received are videos by males. Even YouTube is against me decentering men, I joked. But it's real!
My feed has also seen a lot of “male creep” lately. Mama Doctor Jones and HTCT are channels I watch regularly, and they’ve been MIA unless I search for them, as have the female reactors I also watch more regularly. Instead, YT pushes a lot of white dude reactors and channels I would never watch, for whatever reason. Then you have guy-run channels like Dr. Mike and Tasting History, which I do watch occasionally, but somehow they’re still all up in my feed even though I watch them less than MDJ and HTCT and those female reactors. Go figure, right? I’m sure there’s nooooothing to see here.
It’s important to know that that Amazon tool was never actually launched. They discovered the bias while evaluating it offline and, as a result, shut down the project before it was ever used.
This seems to be more of a case that men do jobs that are less likely to be relevant to generative AI; as in more physical and less cerebral work. It’s actually directly stated in the study that the article refers to. “This is due to the affected occupations being populated by more women than men”
Obviously this is a big issue, but I'm not sure how to feel about this article... Like, is this specifically a "generative AI" problem, or a general "companies automating as many jobs as they can in a race to the bottom line" problem? How much of the gender discrepancy is simply the result of female-dominated jobs being dismissed as unskilled and unimportant? The lack of women in STEM is not a new problem. I think this deserves discussion beyond the existence of AI. I studied "AI" as part of my CS degree, and I can't help but feel people are often clueless about it. Most modern AI is machine learning, where you feed your algorithm a shitload of data and iteratively train it to make sense of it. You get bias because your data comes from a biased world; it's deeper than Joe SoftwareEngineer coding in bigoted rules. Not all AI is generative (producing text or images). Algorithms that count the numbers of birds in a picture, determine if a webpage is relevant to a search query, or detect whether an image represents cancerous cells, are most likely also machine learning. ChatGPT itself is not magically more intelligent than them. Ultimately, it's a text predictor: what worda are most likely to come next? Thus I'm not sure how it's supposed to be useful to a matchmaker, a landscaper, or whatever. Part of the generative AI rush seems like it's coming from business bros rather than people who actually understand how the tool can be useful. (Sorry if this is a little confused btw. I'm still half awake haha.)
“You won’t be replaced by AI. You’ll be replaced by someone who has mastered AI.” So--According to this article, women are not being targeted and consciously replaced. Buy and large they might not be using AI tools in the workplace as much as men, or statistically are in roles that could be replaced by AI tools. In short, if you are in a job that might be replaced by AI, the best thing to do is educate yourself on how to use it.
Great advice. Even just learning how to create better prompts to get more out of something like ChatGPT is going to be a valuable skill. It’s like how learning to use the basic functions of excel is a *really* helpful skill most people seem to neglect.
I keep saying this, because no one is talking about it. But if AI is making our art and our music, and is also doing all of our writing for us, we no longer have human culture, only AI culture. It's one thing to put AI to work doing service work, but creative and intellectual work should not be done by AI. I'm not even sure it's a good idea to use AI for anything at all. But the number of lawyers who have been caught using it scares me. We can not afford to automate our criminal justice system or we will be ruled by AI as well.
With the state of robotics and how fast AI develops (I'm at an elite uni where these things are done/researched) I cannot come up with any job that could not be replaced. None. This is going to happen soon. Over the next 10 years or so. No idea how capitalism is supposed to work like that but others here are right. It will very likely not lead to an egalitarian paradise, probably the opposite.
I don't know about 10 years. 10 years ago from today, people were saying: In 10 years all cars will be driverless, and truck drivers won't exist as a job anymore. It hasn't happened yet, and how long will it take? Another 10 years, 20? More? And all manual labor jobs that are not so simple that they can be replaced by a normal (non-AI) machine, face similar problems to driverless cars. Lower level office jobs and creative jobs will most likely be replaced in high numbers soon, which might be where there's more women than men. Manual labor jobs will take longer, which is where there's more men. And then there's still higher level jobs, like management, which also has more men. Honestly I think it might be another 50 years or more, until a large part of all jobs will be replaced. I might be wrong.
I disagree. Have you seen what robots can do? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e1\_QhJ1EhQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e1_QhJ1EhQ) THis is from almost 1 1/2 years ago. Keep in mind, a robot works 24/7. You do not have to pay them, then can be quickly repaired or replaced. They do not get sick or injured or pregnant. The prices for them are also dropping really fast. The moment AI can be combined with the current state of robotics everything could be on the chopping block. One driver is the quantitative easing policy that somehow is still very much in effect. There are infinite amounts of money and lots of it is going in that direction. This could go very quick. In the US more than 700.000 employees were cut in the tech sector. UPS has also fired more than 12.000 this year. The next few years are probably going to be somewhat mild but after that. Humans cannot compete with a robot with integrated AI.
And yet they will use massive amounts of energy and will primarily use fossil fuels. That will accelerate warming further as well, which will mean people will not be able to afford protections from an increasingly climate-stressed world.
I suspect AI and robotics automation would be in fact incredibly environmentally friendly if you could kill the workers replaced by AI on the spot. The robots will never book a holiday on a different continent and fly there.
Let's not even get into that. One nightmare at a time.
The dark timeline is really coming out swinging
cool cool cool [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POT3plx0vBs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POT3plx0vBs) ;)
You can’t fathom how quickly AI is improving. It’s self-teaching in a world flooded with data. It has improved vastly even compared to last year.
I'd like to see AI working in the field or a greenhouse. It's strange that kids might have to start looking into industries that won't be AI dominated in the future
I can imagine AI might be working those in the future, just not very soon. There's already harvesting machines etc. If those get better both mechanically, and then also use AI, they could work a whole greenhouse alone. Visually recognize where the plant is, where the fruit is, where the weeds are, if it needs water or is ripe yet etc. And then accurately cut/water/pluck the plant etc.
I don't know... the robotics we have still has ages to go. I've seen those field robot prototypes. They look rickety and not reliable. Not to mention - power sources! Like what is going to run all these robots? Oil? Well that'll help the planet. Our reliance on fossil fuels has stymied advancements in renewable energy for like, what a century?
Robot fingerprint bruises on all the peaches 😂😂
AI greenhouses that constantly monitor and optimize conditions for the crop being grown doesn't sound far-fetched at all. Compared to something like a self-driving car, it seems like an easier challenge (I am no expert). We have so much existing data on food crops. Convolutional neural networks can recognize visual data pretty accurately if given enough examples.
Yes this is all part of the plan to turn the US into Gilead. If they’re going to put us in breeding camps they need to find a way to replace us in the workforce Vote accordingly
Wow
AI replaces the easy, menial jobs first. Like data entry, or correspondence.
We need to Ban ai use entirely. Society is nowhere advanced to deal with it right now and all the problems it will cause
Oh no I’m fine with robots taking the job as long as we can get UBI, and they’ll have to figure out a way to keep the economy going if robots take the jobs who’s going to buy the crap they are producing?
We can't even get the minimum wage raised, UBI is not coming.
Yeah UBI is far from any reality.
In some areas of the US, there are legislators trying to preemptively ban UBI programs. Can't have anything that might help people, you know
In that future The big corps would be both the owner of capital and also be the producers of goods(through robot labor). they wouldn't need people anymore. It would be a closed loop. It would be a dystopian future similar to elysium or blade runner
That won't happen because AI has been used for decades. What *should* happen is heavy regulation and controls over its use, but banning it entirely? Never.
Also, they'll just rebrand. "AI's banned? This is just a large language model"
I read the article and I'm confused why this is going to impact women more then men. Can someone help out?
They’re trying so desperately to put us back into the kitchen as house maids and sex slaves
Well yeah, it’s even cheaper.
AI will replace everyone anyways. What’s the fuss?
Like every techniclogical disruption, socio-economic status, race, and gender will affect the degree to which this impacts you. So yes, it is important to highlight uneven impacts of AI on the labor market.
Yeahhh, but this isn’t really anyone’s fault imo
The fuss is that the US government is trying to turn women into breeding livestock and this is just another step in that direction
>In the US, eight out of 10 women, compared to six out of 10 men, *are in roles* that may be replaced by artificial intelligence Am I reading this right? It’s about the roles, not gender specifically. Unless US government is firing these women intentionally I don’t think it is anyone’s fault. Some jobs are more prone to be replaced by AI earlier.
Why are you focused on whose fault it is? That's not really the point
Then what’s the point?