Entry Level Work

I just stumbled across this article on the “Bottom Rung of the Career Ladder“.

I share the author’s concerns. Who can become an expert programmer without first being an entry-level programmer? If AI replaces many entry-level jobs, how can young professionals gain the experience needed to enter the job market at positions above entry-level jobs?

While I don’t expect AI to lead to the future predicted in the Terminator movies, I continue to have several concerns. Here’s a brief list.

1. I’m concerned about significant decisions being made without a “human in the loop” (HITL). While it remains, I trust human wisdom!
2. I’m concerned about AI benefiting large companies and wealthy individuals more than most people in our society. If AI doesn’t benefit everyone, we’re selling ourselves short.
3. I’m concerned about AI amplifying inappropriate biases found in social media posts and elsewhere. Who should decide what data is acceptable for the purpose of training LLM’s?
4. I’m concerned about humanity losing our expertise in “soft skills”. Human conflicts require real human interaction, not AI platitudes.
5. I’m slightly concerned about terrorists and rogue nations using AI to disrupt our basic notions of what is acceptable. AI is only going to “value” human compassion to the degree that it gets compassionate training.

The reason I’m writing about entry-level work is because this is where AI has made its biggest strides. AI can produce “entry-level” coding examples, visual art examples, and more.

While AI may eventually replace senior-level jobs, entry-level jobs are likely to be impacted first. This means that we need to provide a path for entry-level humans to enter the job market.

If we assume that AI is going to continue to advance, then senior-level jobs may eventually be at risk. If young people today fail to get entry-level jobs, then they are not likely to get senior-level jobs while they remain available.

New jobs are going to be created with further AI advances! It’s just that humans may struggle to keep up. Education needs to address changing market realities. And this isn’t going to happen overnight.

While I remain cautiously optimistic, I’m curious to see how the workplace is going to change with continued advances in Artificial Intelligence.