Advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems stand to threaten jobs primarily in the financial, legal and technology sectors, a MLIV Pulse survey says.
What is more striking about the results — more than two-thirds of 292 respondents went on to say they did not view their own jobs as being at risk anytime soon, even though they worked predominantly in the financial sector.
AI has been in development in some form for decades, but a surge of interest in so-called generative AI — most notably OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E products — has sparked widespread excitement among investors who believe it could also generate massive financial rewards.
Photo: Reuters
MLIV Pulse survey participants were split almost evenly on whether these kinds of technologies were worth investing in.
There was an evident lack of professional use of any kind of AI from a majority of investors, with only 12 percent saying they used one and just 27 percent saying they planned to. More than half of all respondents said they are not even considering using AI to help them invest.
Businesses and investors are in a race to become go-to names for technology that can create media such as text and pictures from simple prompts — or hold human-like conversations on a wide variety of topics, from whether a cat would win a fight with an eagle to practical considerations about world events or school projects.
Still, the promise of tools such as ChatGPT leaves room for some investors to desire, with only 49 percent of respondents saying they planned to buy stocks with exposure to such generative AI tools.
Overall, about 41 percent of all respondents said they intended to increase exposure to technology stocks more broadly, while 38 percent said they would hold steady over the next six months.
Even before the current wave of interest in AI, the question of whether smart automation would create more opportunities than it displaces has been a topic of great interest to workers and businesses alike.
This year, many of the companies making job cuts at unprecedented levels are also the ones investing billions in building out their AI capabilities.
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