This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Diana Henriques was first stricken in late 1996. A business reporter for The New York Times, she was in the midst of a punishing effort to bring a reporting project to fruition. Then one morning she awoke to find herself incapable of pinching her contact lens between her thumb and forefinger. Henriques's hands were soon cursed with numbness, frailty, and a gnawing ache she found similar to menstrual cramps.

AGI, while powerful, could have negative consequences, warned Diveplane CEO Mike Capps and Liberty Blockchain CCO Christopher Alexander. Artificial general intelligence – the kind of AI that has capabilities similar to humans – may be far off and offer new opportunities, but experts warn it could be potentially dangerous, and have drastic implications for white-collar workers. "I'm about as excited about AGI as I am about nuclear fission," Diveplane CEO Dr. Michael Capps told Fox News Digital. "It's really amazing what we can do with it, it can power our society, but in the wrong hands, it can do some really dangerous stuff." While there is no one definition of AGI, a 2020 report from consulting giant McKinsey said such a machine would need to master human-like skills, such as fine motor skills and natural language processing.

A few months ago, I was waiting for the subway with a friend, a professional editor, who had never used a large language model (LLM). Standing on the platform, she told me about an article she'd been working on. ChatGPT had come out six weeks earlier, and I input her summary into it on my phone and showed her the result. I'd been following OpenAI's transformer-driven models since 2019 and had forgotten the effect they can have on first exposure. My friend couldn't take her eyes off the little gray box as the article came out, line by line.

Outsourcing has become a popular business tool for companies across the U.S. looking for ways to ... [ ] increase profit margins and cut costs. Johnny Taylor Jr., CEO of the Society of Human Resource Management, offshored the job of a tech employee to India, saving 40% in the labor-cost arbitrage, when she asked to relocate from Arlington, Virginia, where the HR membership group is based, to North Carolina, according to the Wall Street Journal. Companies are accelerating their efforts to send jobs to lower-cost countries in response to the challenge of finding workers and inflation driving up wages. A recent Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta survey found that 7.3% of leadership in the United States plans to move more jobs offshore as the next step from remote work within America. Richard Baldwin, an economics professor at the Graduate Institute in Geneva who studied the "offshoreability" of teleworking jobs, gave a warning at the European-based Center for Economic Policy Research last year, "If you can do your job from home, be scared."

Generative AI is transforming many industries, including entertainment, manufacturing, automotive, and knowledge-based. In knowledge-based industries, it has the potential to automate certain tasks, such as generating legal documents and automating financial analysis, that can increase the productivity of knowledge workers. A report by Research and Markets states generative AI is projected to become a $200.73 billion market by 2032. Recently, Bill Gates, in his blog post, said, "In the future, ChatGPT will be like having a white-collar worker available to assist you with various tasks," But since generative AI is still in its early stages, it has limitations and unintended consequences. While it can perform tasks, it cannot replace the reasoning abilities and cognitive flexibility of humans essential to white-collar knowledge work.

A lot of what Conor Grennan does as a dean of students at NYU's Stern School of Business could be done at least in part by bots. Brainstorming and planning are prime examples of tasks that can be easily handled by generative AI tools like ChatGPT. But instead of feeling like he could be replaced by AI, Grennan has become an evangelist of this technology and its potential to make work better. He likens the opportunity to work with AI technology right now to finding material wealth. "It feels like the Gold Rush, like there's a bunch of people getting to California and seeing little flakes of gold in the river," he told Vox.

As recently as late last decade, for many a journalist, or journalism intern, a key part of the post-interview process involved time spent transcribing the interview; a process that can take hours depending on length and typing speed. These days, uploading the recording to a transcription app such as Otter.ai A recent update, rolled out in September 2022, comes with something called Otter Assistant "to join meetings on Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet to take and share notes automatically."

We have all heard the warnings that invading armies of robots are going to steal our jobs. Few industries are safe; legal clerks and translators are as vulnerable as supermarket cashiers and long-haul truckers. We have been told that mass technological unemployment will necessitate a universal basic income. We have also heard the opposing view: that humans have absorbed waves of automation before, and that we have used the time liberated by technology to generate new, more stimulating professions that have improved our standard of living. But what if neither of these scenarios is accurate? How do we thrive in this kind of hybrid environment?

Chatbots continue to be a hot topic among media, end users and vendor communities. This is no surprise, as chatbot technology -- which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to mimic human conversations -- is beginning to mature and offer more sophisticated solutions. This is primarily because of improved, AI-enabled language capabilities. As a result, more organizations are investing in chatbot development and deployment. In the 2019 Gartner CIO Survey, CIOs identified chatbots as the main AI-based application used in their enterprises.

Automation fears distract from the real problem: too few blue-collar workers. This article is part of an MIT SMR initiative exploring how technology is reshaping the practice of management. Following the Great Recession, anxiety intensified over the prospect of automation causing permanent, widespread unemployment. Feeding on public alarm, a large number of studies assessed the likely impact of future automation on jobs. Although some touted the potential for job creation, others predicted catastrophic job loss. Today, after more than a decade of continuous U.S. economic expansion, the fear of automation remains entrenched in the country's psyche, dominating public discussions and political debates.