Last night’s Dispatches was called Will AI Take My Job? Usually when something like this employs a question mark in the title, it’s because the answer is no. Not this time, though, because the sheer overwhelming inevitability of AI taking our jobs is genuinely painful to think about.
According to the film, 8m jobs in the UK alone are at risk of being outsourced by AI. Call centre workers, translators, graphic designers – anyone who isn’t a masseur or a scaffolder, basically – will soon be made redundant by a technology that, despite its catastrophic effect on the environment, is growing more sophisticated by the hour. My days are almost certainly numbered; it stands to reason that I will soon be replaced by the ChatGPT prompt “Be performatively exasperated about whatever was just on the telly”. Grok could even whip up a byline photo of an unpleasantly smug egg to go with it. Nobody would be any the wiser.
