Automation and You

One of the current trends going around the internet are people messing with ChatGPT - a newly developed chatbot based on OpenAI's GPT-3 Family of language models. The chatbot is quite powerful, being able to answer questions and create documents that typically could not be done by computer. For example, I asked it to "create a solvency certificate". And that's exactly what it spit out (albeit a generic one). Obviously, there were things I would have had to do to adapt it to my job, but the fact it was able to spit it out was quite impressive. One of my auditor friends asked it to make a general audit report for a company and it also spit out a generic report.

If you haven't checked it out yet, you can go here to try it. You have to have a login, but it's free (it also is at capacity sometimes, so you sometimes have to try again later).

Pictured: The logo of what I'm talking about.

We stand at the precipice of a new industrial revolution with many industries previously thought un-automatable. And, from discussions around the office and with friends, I typically get two types of responses: (i) This is just a fad and won't affect anything; or (ii) People in these fields are at risk of losing their jobs.

I believe neither will be true (though, I don't have a crystal ball, so I may end up being proven wrong). But we do have some history for similar mini-revolutions in the past.

As a first example, we can look at the introduction of ATMs to the world of banking. When initially introduced, there were people making the exact same arguments (though, from my understanding, more people were worried about maintaining jobs). What actually happened was that the most mundane parts of a teller's job were taken over, freeing up tellers to work on the more complex parts of their job. As far as whether this actually impacted the field's employment opportunities or reduced the number of tellers, experts disagree (example). However, it is not a simple matter of "ATMs caused mass layoffs".

The legal field (and most other office jobs) were completely revolutionized by the computer and, more specifically, word processing. In the relatively near past, I have heard stories about sorting through literal warehouses of physical documents or having to type up long contracts with a typewriter. Due to these constraints, work at large firms used to be extremely demanding (well, even more demanding as it is today). Now, with the ability to parse through documents on a computer (and having ctrl+f), the work-life balance of associates is better than it once was.

AI will not replace human professionals any time soon, but it will likely fundamentally change how a professional goes about doing their job. Gone are the days of starting completely from scratch for common documents. And not having to build the shell yourself means that you are freed up to do other things. Professionals should be excited about what the future brings, rather than worrying about their position or dismissing the future entirely.