From robotic vacuum cleaners to online shopping, artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly used in all aspects of our lives.
Double-edged: While AI has many benefits in freeing workers from repetitive tasks, call centre workers are among those who may feel job insecurity and psychological distress if they believe the technology will eventually replace them.
AI is also reshaping the world of work by assisting in tasks ranging from writing an email to a client to preventing collisions at airports or helping to diagnose cancer.
Optimists say AI will expand productivity and free workers from boring, repetitive tasks. Pessimists predict AI, which refers to computer systems that can engage in reasoning, learning and planning, will cause mass job losses in factories, CBD offices and perhaps even in academia.
Add concerns about AI’s accuracy and its potential to reinforce existing racial, cultural and gender biases, and it is little wonder schools are now teaching AI literacy to primary school students.
Associate Professor Sarah Bankins, from the Department of Management at Macquarie Business School, says AI has the capacity to impact many of the choices we make about our careers as well as day-to-day work tasks.
From school kids coding robots, to predicting job choices, to creating new professions and career paths, to requiring AI literacy across our working lives; AI has the capacity to influence many aspects of our career decision-making.
AI’s predictive capabilities are already helping teenagers decide whether to be an astronaut or accountant and select the educational pathways to pursue their vocation.
AI is also altering the skills demanded of workers, and driving concerns about the future of careers in an AI-driven world.
“We have learnt much about how AI is impacting individual jobs, but careers can be made up of many jobs based on many decision points and experiences over the course of our lives,” Bankins says.
“We need a better understanding of how AI is being used to help us explore, manage and experience our careers over the long term.”
Growth of AI literacy initiatives
Associate Professor Bankins was part of an international team of researchers who set out to investigate how AI is shaping our work lives, particularly its impact on different career stages, beginning at school.
Uni application: AI tools can predict student performance, recommend career paths and match students to suitable courses, the researchers say.
“From school kids coding robots, to predicting job choices, to creating new professions and career paths, to requiring AI literacy across our working lives; AI has the capacity to influence many aspects of our career decision-making,” Bankins says.
“How we want it to do that is a conversation we hope this research prompts.”
The study, published in the Journal of Vocational Behavior, found AI's predictive capabilities are also used at university for activities such as recommending career paths, matching students to courses and assessing employability.
AI can also predict student performance and the likelihood they will drop out of their studies, to then support targeted interventions.
“Many jobs will be touched by AI in some way, meaning higher education providers can expand and formalise AI literacy initiatives to ready students for AI use in their careers,” Bankins says.
AI also plays a part in career choices made by established workers whether through networking and finding career opportunities to identifying and acquiring new job skills.
However the technology can impact wellbeing, with issues such as job insecurity, depression and reduced career satisfaction for workers who believe AI will replace them.
Call centre agents who think AI will replace their jobs, for example, are more likely to feel insecure and explore other job opportunities.
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In contrast, workers who trust AI are more likely to collaborate effectively with it, contributing to their wellbeing, productivity and career sustainability.
Future improvements could include expanding AI-generated career advice for blue-collar workers and those seeking vocational careers and harnessing its predictive capabilities to assist workers understand the mental and physical demands of different jobs to align their career choices with family and life commitments.
“Using AI to predict what movie people could stream has different implications to it predicting what course they could study or what career they could follow,” says Bankins.
“If we are going to use AI in these ways, we need to be clear on how it arrives at this advice so we can meaningfully use it.”
Sarah Bankins is an Associate Professor in the Department of Management at Macquarie Business School.
