We are not safe from replacement
“Humanoid robots have the potential to lead with a greater level of efficiency and effectiveness than human leaders,” Sophie, a humanoid robot created by Hanson Robotics said during a conference in 2023.
The conference, hosted by the United Nations, was aimed at discussing the uses of AI and included about 3000 experts in the fields of AI and robotics. Several AI-enabled humanoid robots were also in attendance.
As technology has advanced, tools have been created to make people’s lives more convenient. This includes machines that may eventually make human labor obsolete.
Ever since their invention, machines have been a threat to workers. Many fear being replaced by these machines; in fact, more than 40% of all workers, and at least 60% of manual workers have insecurities about robots replacing them (Kozak, M., Kozak, S., Kozakova, A., & Martinak, D. 2020).
Workers on assembly lines have been diminishing throughout the years, being replaced by machines. In the past, the threat of being replaced only applied to workers providing physical labor, however, as technology develops, AI is becoming more advanced and will pose a threat to all kinds of work.
Soon, intellectuals could be replaced as well.
AI has developed rapidly over the past year: the introduction of the famous ChatGPT created by Open AI, AI image generators with Midjourney, etc. have caused “many professional artists [to] [speak] up about the harms they have experienced due to the proliferation of large scale image generators trained on image/text pairs from the Internet” (Rossi & Dos, 2023). Before this, mostly manual labor workers needed to worry about being replaced. However, AI poses a brand new threat. (Kozak, M., Kozak, S., Kozakova, A., & Martinak, D. 2020).
Instagram has long been a place for artists to publish and share their work, however, recently, many artists are moving beyond the app: “Many say they are leaving to prevent the app’s parent company, Meta, from using their art to train AI models,” expressing a distaste in the use of AI models.
This means, though based on databases, AI are now able to replicate an action originally exclusive to humans: creation. When I think of generating new ideas or being inspired by something, I understand it as a connection between the information given and one’s past experiences, and AI can do just that. They take information from the database, and create something based on what you tell it to.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405896320328135