Nigel P. Daly & Laurence Chen (published in Common Wealth Magazine, March 1, 2024; https://english.cw.com.tw/article/article.action?id=3632)
Should you worry about your job being replaced by AI? A recent study found that half of 18-25-year-old Taiwanese are worried that AI will affect their job opportunities. And with Taiwan’s plummeting birthrate, a lack of immigration policy, and advances in AI and robotics, intelligent robots will soon be a necessity. And a threat to many Taiwanese workers.
There are other worrying data—especially for white-collar workers. AI will impact 60% of jobs. AI improves employee productivity by 66%. And tech companies continue to streamline staff, laying off 25,000 in January 2024.
However, the story from these data is not necessarily that AI will replace jobs. For many jobs, it will be the professionals who use AI to enhance their productivity that will replace those who don’t.
So, the real question is: how can you use AI to do this?
Before we answer this question, we need to clarify how humans differ from AI by understanding what we call the knowledge-competence pyramid.
Human wisdom vs AI intelligence
At the base of the pyramid is raw data that, when organized, forms information. When information is contextualized, it becomes knowledge, which means useful information. At the next level up, when knowledge can be applied to perform tasks or solve problems, it becomes intelligence.
This is where AI’s capacity stops. It can execute tasks, like generating text or code, but does not comprehend the ‘why’ behind its actions.
So, intelligence is when knowledge becomes action. However, the pinnacle of this pyramid is wisdom, a level of insight and understanding that AI has yet to, and may never, achieve.
Wisdom involves using intelligence not just competently but creatively and insightfully, to innovate and add value in ways that are uniquely human. This is expertise.
Steve Jobs’ vision for the iPhone exemplifies this. He saw the potential for an all-devices-in-one computer that can fit in your pocket. This type of revolutionary insight is beyond AI.
Why? Because wisdom is the result of extensive learning, practice, and skill-building, popularly known to require 10,000 hours to attain.
It’s this depth of human experience and the capacity for insights into the human condition that sets humans apart.
While AI can produce work more quickly and accurately than humans, it lacks the agency, intentionality, and purpose that human wisdom embodies.
But that is not to say that experts should not use AI.
Intelligent workflows
AI tools have been shown by studies, like the one mentioned above, to enhance both productivity and quality.
The key question for Taiwanese schools, organizations and workers is, for what tasks? Where is AI most beneficial to the user?
There is no one fixed answer, but it will depend on two factors: the job task and the worker’s skill level or wisdom.
It is necessary to first recognize that jobs are composed of tasks. Some can be automated by AI, some can be assisted with AI, and the others should remain human.
Repetitive tasks can be outsourced to AI. But most tasks cannot. Most tasks will require a human-in-the-loop, if not partially, then completely.
Even for tasks that benefit from AI generated content, the process still requires human input and then later evaluation and modification to refine it and align it to the human context and for a human audience.
It is still the human that will give the writing, coding or design its real value.
Human creativity can still be amplified
Expert level creativity, such as persuasive writing and elegant code, require an intrinsic understanding of the language or IT system and its impact on the human reader or user. This requires wisdom about the language system that becomes translated into something that will present value to the reader or user.
This expertise or craftsmanship involves the interplay of emotion and logic, feeling and analysis. This is human wisdom and it has always been this way. Before the computer. Before the internet. Before AI. It applies to carpenters, artists, writers, and computer programmers alike.
Yet, the interaction between human creativity and AI can stimulate new forms of expression and problem-solving. Even professional chess and Go players have discovered new tactics by observing AI gameplay, which pushes the boundaries of their strategic creativity. This synergy between human and AI introduces a collaborative workflow, where AI is a tool that can augment human ingenuity.
AI tools will certainly affect many jobs, for better and worse. If well-integrated into workflows, AI will increase productivity in the majority of white-collar jobs.
However, if nobody uses AI, then there will be no productivity gains. A recent Taiwanese study by the Market Intelligence and Consulting (MIC) Institute revealed that only 36% of Taiwanese have used AI tools like ChatGPT and 47% had no idea about this new technology.
And for people who know about AI, there is the fundamental challenge of how to use it productively. The same MIC study showed that for Taiwanese who know about the technology, 92 percent were concerned about it, with almost two thirds worried about overreliance on AI. This implies a confusion between which tasks can benefit from using AI and which ones do not.
In 2024, more than a year after ChatGPT was released, perhaps the most pressing technology challenge for Taiwanese individuals, corporations, and schools is to figure out how to most effectively integrate AI into workflows that maximize benefits and minimize drawbacks. This is a non-trivial challenge but starts with understanding job tasks and the complementary strengths of humans and AI.
With Taiwan teetering on a population crisis, the government and organizations will be forced to make the shrinking workforce more productive with AI. And professionals will need to become AI fluent in their workflows to remain competitive against not just other humans, but the AI robots who will inevitably flood the workspace in the coming years.
Nigel P. Daly is a Business Communications Instructor at TAITRA’s International Trade Institute. He has a PhD in English from National Taiwan Normal University.
Laurence Chen 陳家宏 is a writer, speaker, and IT consultant at REPLWARE. He assists companies in addressing programming issues and optimizing their data pipelines.
