As artificial intelligence begins to be applied to all areas of society, people's attention is focused on which jobs will be promising in the future and which jobs will disappear or change.
Major domestic and international economic organizations also release annual research reports on this topic. According to a report released by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) at the beginning of the year, approximately 40 percent of jobs worldwide will be affected by generative artificial intelligence (AI). In advanced countries such as the United States and Europe, this figure is expected to reach 60 percent. For example, manufacturing, transportation, and office work are likely to be replaced by AI. The report concludes by warning that if we do not take action in advance, serious social problems could arise.
Goldman Sachs, an American multinational investment bank, also released a report on the future job outlook. According to the report, up to 29 percent of computer-related jobs, 28 percent of medical workers and medical technology jobs, 46 percent of administrative jobs, and 44 percent of legal jobs are expected to be replaced by AI. Goldman Sachs has a slightly different prediction from the IMF. While the IMF predicts that jobs that involve repetitive, simple tasks such as manufacturing, transportation, and office work will likely be replaced by AI, Goldman Sachs predicts that AI will play an important role in high-level professional fields such as medicine and law.
We cannot say that one organization is wrong because the two organizations' predictions are different. Both are the results of collecting information through a global network and commissioning high-level experts to write so they are clearly persuasive in their own way. The predictions are different because the subject of the analysis is storytelling about the future, a time that has not yet arrived. If it were a story about the past, you could package the facts that existed into an appropriate narrative to create a story. Still, the future is a space surrounded by mysterious elements, so you cannot enter with one or two keys. In fact, there are many cases where the predictions are revised and supplemented after the forecast report is released.
Let's take an example. When it was announced in 2016, eight years ago, that professional Go player Lee Sedol 9-dan would play against the artificial intelligence Go program AlphaGo developed by Google's DeepMind, most experts at the time predicted Lee Sedol 9-dan's victory. Unlike chess, in the case of Go, there are many moves, so the pre-programmed AlphaGo could not beat the experienced professional player. However, as we all know, AlphaGo won 3-1, and Lee Sedol became the only human to have beaten an AI at least once. Since Lee Sedol, no other player has beaten AlphaGo. That was just eight years ago.
After Lee Sedol, people began to think again about the speed of AI development and began to look for areas that AI could not do. One of them was work or jobs related to creativity. It was judged that even if numerous jobs and jobs were replaced by the development of AI, only human creativity would survive. Experts judged that AI is a kind of processor that performs tasks based on collected data, so it is suitable for analytical and repetitive work, but not for creative work such as creating works of art, and predicted that creative work will remain the exclusive domain of humans for a long time in the future.
However, this prediction was also significantly off the mark. Even creativity, considered a unique domain of humans, has been subsumed into the domain that AI can do. AI draws pictures, writes novels, composes music, and produces videos. The text-to-video model Sora developed by the American artificial intelligence research institute OpenAI creates videos with just a few words of text. The quality of the videos is also high. Naturally, as time passes, that is, when it learns on its own, the quality will improve even more. Many computer graphic designers will inevitably lose jobs. This is also why hundreds of thousands of members of the Writers Guild of Hollywood (WGA) and the Screen Actors and Television Professionals (SAG-AFTRA) went on strike in protest against the use of generative AI in video production.
It is not easy to predict future jobs when predictions made a few years ago are inaccurate. However, Homo sapiens have always been interested in the future and have constantly prepared for the future for a better life. One of the reasons for having faith is to prepare for the future.
Let's ask a question here. Can AI replace the priesthood? To answer this question, we must first analyze the work of the priesthood. One of the main tasks, writing sermons, can be replaced by AI. If you tell them some general situations, such as Bible verses and, holidays, recent events in the community, and instruct them to write a sermon, they will do it without any problems. It is similar to lawyers drafting opinions with the help of AI. AI has learned numerous precedents and can answer lawyers' requests in less than a minute. AI can also do better in answering Bible studies or theological questions. The level and accuracy of answers are determined by the amount of data learned, so it is difficult for people to be better than AI. Writing universal and appropriate answers through data learning is no longer competitive. However, there is a hint here. In some cases, AI cannot provide answers no matter how much data it learns. These are individual, special situations. In addition to general problems such as economic hardship, suffering from illness, and family problems, AI cannot learn about special situations that individuals are experiencing because there is only one data. Since it cannot learn, it cannot suggest solutions.
Homo sapiens is both a creation of God and a result of evolution. In their bodies and minds, primordial mysteries, all processes of history, and concerns and expectations about the end are inherent. And all of this is collective and individual at the same time. When these sapiens wander at the intersection of existential concerns and realistic difficulties, the subject who can hold their hand, comfort them, and pray for them can only be a fellow human being. If empathy and comfort are the main tasks, not public preaching, then the subject of that role is clear. Here is the essence of the question that AI poses to us. What is the essence of what you do?
