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Franco Ricotti's avatar

You may be interested in reading a study made by Italian Central Bank about “An assessment of occupational exposure to artificial intelligence in Italy”.

A first finding is :

Overall, the different methodologies agree on the fact that occupations requiring cognitive skills are more likely to be exposed to the introduction of AI, a marked difference compared to the introduction of robots, one of the most recent waves of innovation observed.

And moreover:

Observably, AI technologies have brought advancements in all those activities (perception, handling with dexterity, content generation, social interactions) that were previously considered inherently human and at low exposure. In fact, some of the occupations with low exposure to earlier automation technologies now appear in the medium or high exposure groups, albeit with different degrees of complementarity (e.g. mathematicians or human resource managers). Other occupations, mainly related to physical strength, were highly exposed to some of the previous technological waves, but appear only mildly exposed to AI.

You find the full paper in English at this link:

https://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/qef/2024-0878/index.html?com.dotmarketing.htmlpage.language=1

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Ken Durazzo's avatar

Fantastic read, thank you for sharing, provided me a few different lines of thought.

Creator / Amanuensis:

The positioning of creator and amanuensis is interesting, I can see that as a possibility but also see hints of a more collaborative future ahead, where it's not just ‘conceptualizing and writing’ but rather an interplay between the human and AI to bring to life new works, potentially working with each other in real time (truly collaborating) to create the outcomes.

Most of the digital creators I know already use a simpler form of this, in that they use the AI to create an initial draft of a concept, and then the human will take control to refine it or change it to an outcome. But it seems that is only taking a baby-step towards a more iterative and collaborative future with AI.

Human or AI Tools:

Simplistically, I like to use Cattell’s theory of fluid and crystallized intelligence, to create a starting point for drawing a distinction between human and AI uniqueness and capabilities. If this is used as a baseline, it seems plausible that there are some tasks that are not achievable with our current AI and are therefore more likely to be a human task.

It seems that fluid or crystallized may be too gross of a classification however, for a lot of scientific work, as an example both photons and gravity were known constructs for a long time, before their interactions were hypothesized / discovered (by a human).. and due to the ‘distance’ of their relationships (macro vs micro), its improbable that they would have been able to be discovered by AI. Perhaps this is an area that needs to be explored more deeply in order to really understand the impact to the future of work and where humans and machines (may, should, could, will not) perform roles interactively or separately.

Deeply appreciate the thought exercise you shared, great insights and observations to ignite deeper thoughts.

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