I will always remember May 19, 2020 as the day that I first felt threatened by the now worrisome AI wave. Back then I was working as a freelance transcriber for an online outsourcing company, and I've been with them for about 8 months. While transcribing a particular voice call, I felt cold shivers run down my spine. A month later, my fear was confirmed in emphatic fashion.
The call I transcribed that day was of a lending company who were about to repossess the vehicle of their client because the client already missed a couple of loan repayments. The company was trying to find a reasonable solution to the issue so they called to discuss affordable ways by which the client could meet up with her loan. During the discussion, they asked about the client's income and that was when the customer dropped a line that still scares me till today - she was a transcriber with 15 years experience but recently lost her job to AI.
At first, it sounded ordinary to me; I was just a transcriber doing my job. But then, the reality of the whole discussion hit me - if a transcriber with 15 years worth of experience can lose her job to AI, I definitely stand no chance. Right? A month later, the AI wave eventually got to me in brutal fashion. The pay rate per transcribed minute was slashed by about 50% or more, jobs became scanty and the available ones were incredibly hard to transcribe. Without mincing words, AI already took over our jobs and the company doesn't really need human transcribers anymore. Slashing the pay was their own way of honourably saying, "Guys, bye-bye."
Since then I've been very wary of the threat AI posed, and the latest success AI stuffs like ChatGPT and co are enjoying proved my fears were not unfounded. As a full time freelancer, it's very hard to probably find an online skill that AI doesn't pose a threat to in the long run. As we all know, AI now writes compelling articles better than some human generated ones. I'm not into software development or coding, but I'm very sure AI can do a decent job of ruining that niche too. What else? I'm a trained Virtual Assistant and even at that, I believe AI will start rivalling humans for gigs in that niche too - that's if they're not already doing that.
Despite the raging effect of AI on the labour market, its impact is more felt either by folks of the online community or developed countries. In the developing countries, the effect of AI on the labour market is still somewhat muted because most small and medium businesses still rely on manual labour. I'm an environmental scientist and I can tell you the last time I was at a laboratory - which was very recent - AI simply rarely exists or interfere in the research and scientific phase of things here.
So, for me, if AI decides to take over all the freelance gigs I depend on, I don't see it taking over research works in this space, at least for now. That's one skill I can always leverage on. Asides that, there are other hands-on skills that I really do not need to discuss here that I can leverage on too. Just like I said earlier, a lot of things are pretty manual here. I will start getting scared shitless whenever AI starts fabricating and installing aluminium products. That's one skill tucked in the bag in case every other one heads down the drain. In fact, I learnt a hard lesson when AI took my job and rendered me jobless for two months. It will never happen again.
