I recently got a new laptop computer (I do recommend the Dell XPS — I’ve had three) and a friend was helping me set it up and get all my programs and files moved over to the new laptop.
He works in IT and runs an entire IT infrastructure for a company. I asked him what he thought about ChatGPT. He said he had tried it for his IT job and found it could do routine tasks that he used to have to manually perform — quickly and efficiently, with no errors.
Which brings me to
this (paywalled) article from the New York Times and this quote:
“One complicating factor is that
technology tends to automate tasks, not entire occupations. In 2016, for instance, the artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton considered new ‘deep learning’ technology capable of reading medical images. He concluded that ‘if you work as a radiologist, you are like the coyote that’s already over the edge of the cliff but hasn’t yet looked down.’”
I’ve bolded the pertinent part of the quote. This is where it will start anyway. Some jobs may go away, but others will have portions of their duties made easier or eliminated altogether. AI-driven radiologists will not get tired or have fuzzy eyes. A human will likely double check what the AI has detected and then the human will need to communicate as only humans can, with empathy, to someone needing information about the diagnosis. The empathy part will likely come down the road as AI reads the emotion in people’s voices and detects their increased pulse rate, sweating and rapid breathing — all of which are indicators of stress.
Eric Holdeman is a contributing writer for Emergency Management magazine and is the former director of the King County, Wash., Office of Emergency Management.
