Posted by For several months now, there has been an ongoing discussion about what effects the spread of artificial intelligence, which is identified with Chat GPT thanks to the company OpenAI, will have on societies. At the beginning of the creation of this blog, I cited an article from 2016, where several hundred scientists commented on their predictions for how artificial intelligence would replace humans in particular professions.
A few months after that post, I have two observations. First, back in January 2023, almost no one knew about the existence of OpenAI and GPT Chat! The topic of general-purpose artificial intelligence hardly existed in people’s minds or in the media. Secondly, at that time, I pointed out that the research to date does not identify the manager as a profession that can be replaced by artificial intelligence. And interestingly enough, here still nothing has changed!
In other words: both then, when artificial intelligence was more of a creature from science fiction movies or looked like a supercomputer full of integrated circuits (that was in 2016, which is quite recent!), and now, when artificial intelligence has knocked on Kowalski’s door via GPT Chat, manager as a profession is still not a replacement among those that can be replaced by a robot.
Let me clarify right away that I usually say “replace a human manager with an artificial manager,” because it’s a slightly simpler linguistic form, and it’s also more capacious, as I believe that artificial intelligence can be part of an artificial manager, but not necessarily its most important part. I recently wrote about the managerial tools that are necessary for a robot to work and be able to solve organizational problems, rather than just being an advice generator. There remains the question of physical representation, what that manager would look like. It is an open question whether it should be a humanoid sitting behind a desk or an app on a phone setting tasks on its team’s calendar.
Let’s go back to the professions that could be replaced by artificial intelligence. I found an interesting video, in which the author presents the results of a study on the possibility of replacing the tasks performed by artificial intelligence. It turns out that the degree of replacement is the greater the … greater the share of cognitive processes over physical processes. Paradoxically, however, human performance of these tasks requires a longer period of practice and repetition! From this it follows that the more complex the profession in terms of the thought processes performed, the easier it will potentially be for artificial intelligence to replace it.
In conclusion, I don’t know if you realize that the race between man and “computer” has begun. A rather unequal race, and it must end with man losing. The same race, but in terms of manual labor, began more than a century ago, when the first multi-batch productions of, for example, automobiles were created and Henry Ford decided to use the solution he had seen in the slaughterhouse and constructed the first production line. At first, people worked on it, but over time the work of laborers was replaced by that of robots.
In the case of physical processes, man lost to machine. This time it will be exactly the same for cognitive processes. However, it will take not a hundred years, but a dozen or so…