“Is it necessary to automate all jobs? Should we develop non-human minds that outnumber and outsmart us and eventually replace us? Should we risk losing control of our civilization?”

In an almost apocalyptic tone, more than 1,800 academics and entrepreneurs have raised the cry to heaven this week alarmed by the unstoppable advances of generative artificial intelligence, a technology that has popularized the ChatGPT platform, exploited by the US company OpenAI. In just three months it has reached 100 million users worldwide and has accelerated the technological race for automated natural language. The letter has been signed by Elon Musk, the controversial founder of Tesla and owner of Twitter, but also bears the rubric of Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, and hundreds of entrepreneurs and academics from prestigious universities.

As the graph shows, the advances in this technology are getting faster and faster, and there is a feeling in the market that this technology may escape the control of humans. We are facing a paradigm shift, according to tycoon Bill Gates. “Throughout my life I have seen two demonstrations of revolutionary technologies. The first was in 1980, when I was introduced to the graphical interface from which Windows has been developed. The second big surprise came last year, when I saw the progress of OpenAI. The algorithm answered questions for which it was not specifically trained and its margin of error was limited”, recently published on its website the founder of Microsoft, a company that has announced an investment of 10,000 million precisely in this platform.

The potential of ChatGPT and its counterparts – there are thousands of similar platforms, including Anthropic, in which Google has invested $300 million – seems enormous. A study published earlier this week by Goldman Sachs claims that if this technology reaches the levels of sophistication it promises, it could end up eliminating a quarter of jobs in the United States and the Eurozone. Globally, a fifth of the workforce could be in a compromised situation. According to the study, drawn up by economists Joseph Briggs and Devesh Kodnani, this would equate to around 300 million jobs in major economies. The most exposed would be administrative, lawyers, architects, scientists, commercial, IT… As the graph shows, practically no profession is spared. With the exception, of course, of purely physical jobs, such as construction, cleaning or maintenance (although they could be automated with other types of technologies).

Education is a separate case. It is one of the sectors highly susceptible to automation, as has already been verified in schools and universities, which have banned the use of this technology in order to avoid plagiarism among students. Among them are Oxford, Cambridge and Sciences Po. Esteve Almirall, a professor at Esade who specializes in open innovation, doubts that this technology will have much use in the education sector. “Artificial intelligence will be held back by the educational legislation of each country. It seems difficult that this technology will make the figure of the primary and secondary teacher disappear, at least in Spain”, he maintains.

That of Goldman Sachs is not the only study that warns that it deals with the disappearance of jobs due to the impact of generative AI. According to a report by OpenAI, two out of ten workers in the United States could automate 50% of their work, while eight out of ten could leave 10% of their activity in the hands of the robot.

With this data on the table, the old fear of the replacement of humans by machines returns, an idea that economists are trying to nuance. “In the short term, the effects of AI could negatively affect the labor market, but in the long term it has been proven that new technologies have positive effects, because they have created jobs that did not exist before, in addition to increasing the productivity of companies in a significant way”, points out the report of Briggs and Kodnani, who cite the case of the appearance of the electric motor or the personal computer during the last decade.

It is still unknown when this will happen – it depends on the advancement of technology and its regulation – but experience says that the productivity of the labor market explodes 20 years after the irruption of the technology. So there are still a couple of decades left to meet the new specialists that this new technology will demand.

Faced with these prospects, Almirall believes that companies and governments cannot look the other way. “Generative AI is a generic technology of such great scope that we need to take advantage of its potential instead of being frightened by the risks it poses. Legal frictions can be regulated in a consensual manner”, points out the professor, who applauds the initiative of the Government of Iceland against the position of Italy, which on Friday decided to ban this technology.

At the moment, a race has broken out within the industry to lead the sector. Right now, it is clear that the company leading the initiative is Microsoft with its million dollar investment in ChatGPT. “Google and Amazon are following, while China is making little noise developing its internal technologies. The sector is fueled by thousands of emerging companies that try to complement the service of the star platform”, comments Eudald Camprubí, co-founder of the company Nuclia, which specializes in the search for intelligent data in the sector.

According to data from the consulting company Pitchbook, investment funds invested 1,260 million euros (about 1,370 million dollars) in emerging companies in this sector, a figure similar to the sum of the investment of the last five years. For this year, Pitchbook forecasts that the sector will more than multiply its business size to 49 billion. Artificial intelligence is in full swing.