Warn your children: Robots and AI are coming for their careers

For five years or so, I have been running around as a pale imitation of Paul Revere, yelling, "The robots are coming! At schools, social settings, with family and friends, or even to complete strangers with whom I fell into conversations, I have uttered the same warning: "It's critical that you or your children identify a career -- now -- that won't be taken over by robots and artificial intelligence." My particular midnight ride started well before the pandemic reared its ugly head. But the pandemic may have planted a seed in the minds of certain CEOs that human beings are the weakest link on their chain to profit and prosperity. When the first "Terminator" movie was released -- eerily enough, in 1984 -- the world was introduced to Cyberdyne Systems and its "Skynet" artificial superintelligence system, which not only gained self-awareness but realized it could do everything infinitely faster and better than its human creators. Well, ever since that movie got people asking, "What if," the fictional theme -- and warnings about AI -- have been morphing into reality. The latest example of a technology poised to replace a human workforce is ChatGPT, the chatbot auto-generative system created by Open AI for online customer care. It is a pre-trained generative chat, which makes use of natural language processing, or NLP. The source of its data is textbooks, websites and various articles, which it uses to model its own language for responding to human interaction. It's certainly not a stretch to believe that any number of CEOs might think, "Interesting… A self-teaching artificial intelligence system that won't call in sick, doesn't need to be fed or to take bathroom breaks, does not require health care, but can and will work 24/7/365." Not shockingly, it has been reported that Microsoft, which is laying off 10,000 people, announced a "multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment" in this revolutionary technology, which apparently is growing smarter by the day. Pengcheng Shi, an associate dean in the Department of Computing and Information Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology, warned in an interview with the New York Post: "AI is replacing the white-collar workers.