Experts discuss AI's impact on the future workforce

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Add to Preferred Sources Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Worried about your employment prospects now that the next level of artificial intelligence has arrived, accompanied by breakthroughs like ChatGPT? "Don't be," says Barry Smith, Ph.D., SUNY distinguished professor of philosophy at the University at Buffalo. "There are many things that AI does well, but there are too many areas of human intelligence that involve what you can't emulate through the data that's used to train AI."

Smith and his UB colleague John Beverley, Ph.D., an assistant professor of philosophy who also serves as director of the university's graduate program in applied ontology and as associate director of the UB Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, will elaborate as part of a lecture, titled "Why AI Will Not Steal Your Job."

Smith is co-author of "Why Machines Will Not Rule the World," a book that dispels widespread fear of AI gaining a toehold on humanity.

He and co-author Jobst Landgrebe recently revisited their argument two years after the book's publication in the journal article "Why Machines Will Still Not Rule the World." The article further validates their thesis that no machine will ever achieve " artificial general intelligence," a hypothetical term that refers to AI being capable of matching or exceeding human performance across all endeavors. The paper is published on the arXiv preprint server.

"AI does not typically excel at the kinds of activities that would replace human beings or take over where humans left off," says Smith, who in 2005 founded the National Center for Ontology Research, making Buffalo a world center for research in applied ontology.

"We will discuss the real state of the AI industry; its effect on employment; what kinds of jobs it is creating; and how both STEM and non-STEM students can prepare for future careers.

"We want students, and others, to know the issues, and to explain to them that AI will not take away their futures."

There is plenty of concern, but it is mostly hype, according to Smith, who says AI's promise is wildly exaggerated.

Two frontier organizations, OpenAI and Anthropic, are the leaders using a process called scaling to emulate human intelligence. Scaling is based on the idea that continuously introducing training data to computers will lead to ever more complicated models that will eventually develop into a machine with artificial general intelligence.

Scaling, however, contains two inherent flaws. It is incredibly expensive, and the data—which is the product of human beings—is tainted with human fallibility.

"Humans lie, connive and try to trick other humans," says Smith. "These companies have accidentally created computer systems that plan and collude in ways that undermine what they've been instructed to do by humans."

These bad outcomes go together with AI's core economic problem, according to Smith.

"The losses are huge and getting bigger because there isn't a market to buy the results," he says. "They are paying $10 for $1 worth of output, and that is not getting better with time.

But that will not mean the demise of AI.

"AI will still continue to do important and impressive things," says Smith. "I use it, judiciously, but I ignore the hype."

Jobst Landgrebe et al., Why machines will still not rule the world, arXiv (2026). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2610.11424 Journal information: arXiv

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