In Sept. 2020, The Guardian published an opinion piece written by a program.

In Sept. 2020, The Guardian published an opinion piece written by a program. The artificial intelligence, called GPT-3, is a large language model developed by OpenAI, and it posed a bold question in the headline of its machine-generated text: "A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?" Indeed, it is a scary time to be a professional writer. Earlier in 2020, Microsoft laid off journalists to replace them with a writing AI. And as AI language models get increasingly better, researchers are claiming that soon, AI-generated text will be indistinguishable from that written by a person.

A study from Redwood Software and Sapio Research released October 4th revealed that IT leaders believe automation could impact 60% of businesses by 2022 and threaten jobs in the process. Now, a new, separate report from PwC, the second biggest professional services firm worldwide, suggests a similar timeline; one in which people may need to practice and learn new skills -- or be left behind as automation takes over. The report, titled Workforce of the Future, surveyed 10,000 people across China, India, Germany, the UK, and the U.S. to "better understand the future of work." Of those, nearly 37% think artificial intelligence and robotics will put their jobs at risk; in 2014, 33% had a similar concern. A startling scenario the report envisions for the future is one in which "typical" jobs -- jobs people can steadily advance in through promotions -- no longer exist, prompting the aforementioned move to develop new skills.