ARTIFICIAL intelligence will inevitably replace “certain” human jobs but companies should be responsible for retooling their employees who will be affected by it, former chief operating officer of Nestlé Group Peter Brabeck-Letmathe said.
Brabeck-Letmathe is in Manila for the two-day conference on corporate responsibility by the Asian Institute of Management.
His remarks came a few days after broadcast giant GMA Network Inc. drew flak from social media for the introduction of AI-powered sportscasters during the opening of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Season 99 games.
“Any technological revolution has an impact on the labor market. We have seen this with the invention of the steam engine that not only replaced human beings but also animals. The same thing happened with electricity. The same thing is going to happen with ChatGPT. It is going to replace a lot of human thinking,” he told reporters after his opening remarks.
ChatGPT, short for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is an AI chatbot that uses natural language processing to create conversational dialogue that sounds like human.
The Austrian businessman said while AI will replace jobs, it will also create new ones.
“The problem is not the jobs will disappear. The problem is we have to re-skill the workers for the new jobs and those who are not being re-skilled are going to be the victims of the technological revolution,” Brabeck-Letmathe said.
He said one of the corporate responsibilities that companies need to undertake is to continuously train its work force.
“I remember when we introduced 20 years ago the idea to digitalize the entire company. Many people, especially in developing countries, are worried they will lose their jobs. Because some of them do not know how to write, how to read. But we trained them so they will not lose their jobs. And they had new jobs which were much more fulfilling than they had before,” he said.
GMA Network had clarified that the use of AI sportscasters is not meant to replace journalists.
Brabeck-Letmathe believes the human race will not be replaced by robots who looked like humans, similar to the movie “Terminator.”
“The real replacement will be artificial intelligence which we don’t see. It’s the information. It’s the body, it’s not a thing, It’s information,” he said.
The former said, now, humans are already using “cyborg” intelligence.
“The big part of your brain is already delegated to your iPhone. This is what artificial intelligence is all about. This is what we are going to be—more and more like cyborgs. We are simply outsourcing part of our brain into this funny instrument,” he explained.
He said AI is generally “good” for humanity “as long as we can control it and guide it.”
“I think we have to have strong regulations on what the AI can do and should not do. Like, killer robots—the lethal autonomous weapons systems. The robot decides who to kill or who not to kill. I don’t think they should be around. So we have to regulate AI,” he added.
The Philippine government had earlier proposed that the international community come up with rules on AI, including manufacture and use killer robots.
Image credits: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg
