ILO study finds AI to complement, rather than replace jobs

 International Labour Organisation (ILO) asserted that the impending surge of artificial intelligence (AI) is more likely complement and not destroy jobs by automating some tasks rather than taking over a role entirely.

A report released this week by ILO, encompassing a global perspective, provides crucial insights into the potential impact of generative AI on various occupations and tasks.

Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, or ChatGTP, has been stoking worldwide discussion around the benefits and drawbacks of AI since its launch last November.

The chatbot responds to prompts and generates text. Companies and the general public use it in many ways, including managing workflows, quickly responding to queries, writing code, composing essays, planning vacations, and creating personalised content for social media.

The ILO report found that clerical work was the job category with the highest exposure to technology. In other occupational groups – managers, professionals and technicians, for example – only a small share of tasks was found to be at risk of redundancy.

“As a result, the most important impact of the technology is likely to be of augmenting work – automating some tasks within an occupation while leaving time for other duties – as opposed to fully automating occupations,” the report said.

The study documents notable differences in the effects on countries at different levels of development linked to current economic structures and existing technological gaps. In wealthier countries, 5.5 percent of total employment is potentially exposed to the automating effects of Generative AI, whereas the risk is only around 0.4 percent in low-income countries.

“Such insights are necessary for proactively designing policies that can support orderly, fair, and consultative transitions, rather than dealing with change reactively,” the report added, highlighting the need to design policies that support an orderly, fair and consultative transition.

In conclusion, the report noted that the socioeconomic impacts of Generative AI will largely depend on how it is adopted and rolled out.