Career perceptions
To get a flavour of the comments this overview was drawn from, the following are a selection of lightly edited human verbatims.
Health
‘Pilots are already underway to assess the patient safety and accuracy in care settings, lack of health resources with increased demand drives the search for alternatives.’
‘Trending large amounts of data to look for patterns and correlation in populations that can discover unknown causes of illness.’
‘Using AI to simplify creating well designed services based on typical standards makes it so much easier for lower budget/public sector to create good services.’
Society, security
‘Current "AI" is more of an beefed-up expert system, rather than true intelligence, and politicians/civil servants don't understand it. They are highly likely to make rash, ill-informed decisions about AI, related technologies and legislation.’
‘With the continuing polarisation around the globe, associated wars, and the capability for bad actors attacking through cybersecurity, I feel that bad actors will increasingly use AI capabilities to enhance their actions, whilst governments and companies will need to use similar capabilities to defend against such attacks.’
‘The purpose of intelligence is to solve problems. No better unselfish priority than the things that make quality of life higher for those in need. Please don't just discover gunpowder all over again and set it to war and personal gain.’
‘Companies want to remove the risks of human inconsistencies in handling customer services and "streamline" complaints procedures. A server room also takes up less space than a call centre!’
‘Because AI is a marketing ploy and it depends on how many IT “professionals” are seduced by the spiel as to how much IT/IA resources is diverted into what is, as yet, a red herring!’
Education
‘My thoughts: AI will likely replace many traditional teaching roles and add more capabilities to remaining teaching roles. Other sectors, especially IT, health and defence, will also be impacted, but their peak impact might come maybe slightly later, e.g. 2025 and later. But for education, this will come rapidly already in 2024.’
‘Enable students to self-learn outside the classroom.’
‘AI will be able to personalise education according to each individual's needs. This will improve the learning experience significantly which could lead to a more people wanting to improve their skills and creating more value to the workforce.’
‘AI already filters through all the dross of Google searches when looking for answers. Imagine applying that to a syllabus.’
‘There are a lot of positives for education providers, such as planning support and development of resources. However, it makes academic misconduct a greater risk but more difficult to identify.’
‘Negative impact with students becoming too reliant on it, believing responses are correct, and not practicing/applying their own capabilities. Outcomes will be skewed.’
Media and publishing
‘Creatives are always undervalued so I see this as easy pickings for people thinking they can automate away a "cost".’
‘Deepfakes and artificially created content are a massive influence on the general public who are not educated to see the manipulation.’
‘Popular AI at the moment is LLM, well suited to writing copy.’
‘Generating derivative material from existing material already published/broadcast. It'll make it easy to generate "more of the same".’
Customer services
‘The current hype on AI is about large language models. It feels that customer services will be the first to show a great impact. Customer services have large base of natural language incidents, and a machine doesn't get offended with a frustrated or violent customer. If a customer support representative/engineer doesn't know a language, the Chatbot may be able to communicate perfectly with the customer in their native tongue.'
Finance
‘Repeatability of many financial regulatory and compliance tasks lends itself to an AI element.’
Skills
‘More helpdesks are using AI as the first point of contact with customers. Using AI for this purpose has enabled skilled staff to become the deep support, only required when AI is unable to resolve the issue.’
‘Copilot can help create code.’
