Is AI coming for your job ?
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The Pat Kenny Show. With Timber Living Log Cabins. Saturday and Sunday from 10am. On Newstalk. Conversation that counts.
Now, we are welcoming into the studio Professor Luke O'Neill, Professor of Biochemistry at the School of Biochemistry and Immunology at Trinity College in Dublin. Luke, good morning. Good morning, Matt. You're talking about AI. I am, yes. Now, the reason is, I decided, you know, to ask, am I expendable in my job? So I said to AI this morning, will you write me an introduction for Professor Luke O'Neill?
How does AI threaten the graduate jobs market?
Yeah, go ahead. And this is what I got.
Today we are diving into the fascinating world of human health and groundbreaking science. Our next guest makes complex biology sound like a gripping thriller. He is one of the world's most influential immunologists. He's a best-selling author, an award-winning communicator, and Trinity College Dublin's own professor of biochemistry. You know him from his tireless work explaining global health crisis, his infectious enthusiasm for discovery, and maybe even his passion for rock music. Will you welcome to the show the brilliant, the energetic... Professor Luke O'Neill.
That's fake news, Phil. That's not really AI generated. It's amazing. It just shows you somewhat, maybe half accurate. I'm not quite so sure.
I don't think you're quite expendable yet. Even if the facts are kind of there in it, it's not what I would write. No, exactly. I did ask you to do a Pat Kenny version, but it wasn't much. Different. No, no, no.
Isn't it amazing you can do that, though, nowadays? You can just stick things in and get things out.
Where, you know, as someone who's researching something would find it useful is you get a 200-page government document from a department, and you know most of it's puffery. Yeah. So you stick it in and you get the essence. You get the summary. The problem is you might miss nuance somewhere along the way, and that's the difficulty. Or maybe the AI machine will hallucinate. That's the trouble. That's exactly right. But you've been looking at the principal problems that arise
From AI. Yeah, it's all over the news every time. Even the Pope himself made a speech about AI recently. I think in Forbes magazine this week, which I don't read that often, but it listed all the jobs that are threatened. And that's the fear, isn't it? They reckon 300 million jobs are at risk through AI. Globally. Globally, for example. It's hard to predict these things. But I quite liked it because there's positive aspects as well. Just like you said, we still need humans to do certain things. But now they're predicting. So, for example, in paralegal stuff, 48% of jobs are going to go. In accountancy and bookkeeping, 86% of jobs are going.
Like machines cannot. better than humans.
They can, yeah. This might be, Michael, the grunt work, you know. And also in marketing, basic marketing, 48% of jobs will go, you know. So those kinds of things are under threat.
Now, you've been looking at an article written by Camilla Cavendish in the Financial Times last week, and there are a number of key issues that are troublesome about AI. Yeah.
I like that, Pat, because she lays out the good things and the bad things very clearly, Camilla, great journalist, you know. The first thread is copyright breach, because obviously AI can read the literature of novels and write a new novel and you're breaching copyright. The second is social media harming mental health and we all worry about that. The third part is a big one, energy demand. These data centres that are using a huge amount of energy. In Ireland, she says, at the moment, 22% of our grid goes into data centres, whereas in 2015, it was 5%. So a huge increase in energy needs coming off these data centres.
Which has implications for building out the grid to be able to sustain these kind of energy transfers. Exactly, yeah.
Yes, and then the other big one, Pat, is the white-collar jobs. It's the white-collar jobs that are threatened, all these sorts of jobs that we've just mentioned.
There's another one in there, it's a psychological one.
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