Broadcast Retirement Network’s Jeffrey Snyder discusses the mental health impact of artificial intelligence on America’s workforce with University of Florida’s Joseph Thornton, MD and Stephanie McNamara.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Joining me now is Dr. Joseph Thornton and Stephanie McNamara of the University of Florida. Joe, Stephanie, so great to see you.
Thanks for joining us this morning. Thank you.
Joseph Thornton, MD, University of Florida
Thanks. Thank you for having us.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
I, you know, you can’t go anywhere on the planet really and not hear about artificial intelligence. Dr. Thornton, I want to start with you because there’s a lot of concern that many workers have. And I think you’ve really looked into this with Stephanie’s help.
There’s a lot of people that are concerned that they’re going to be replaced by artificial intelligence.
Joseph Thornton, MD, University of Florida
That’s a very legitimate concern. It’s actually the stated objective of many of the larger corporations these days, because it’s not enough just to make more money or profit, but to make more profit per employee. So the amount of revenue per employee is the new metric.
And so now we’re in a situation where you read constantly in the headlines, Planeteer was the most recent one or Block. A couple of those large tech agencies have actually laid off. One, Planeteer, I think laid off 40% of its employee workforce.
And yet their stock’s going up and their profit margin’s going up. So the companies are incentivized to lay off people. And it’s not like you can pick up where you were.
As a physician, normally I could find another job pretty easy. But if you’re a coder or all types of knowledge work now, that’s going to be less easy to do.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Stephanie, we all like to think we’re irreplaceable. I know I do. But the reality is that we are replaceable.
And in some instances, we’re replaceable by artificial intelligence, as Dr. Thornton just mentioned. And I wonder if you could share your perspective. Because not only did you help with this report, but you’re also an undergraduate and you’re going to have certain job prospects based on your degree.
So what’s your perspective about this, both as a researcher and also as someone who is going through the college experience today?
Stephanie McNamara, University of Florida
Yeah. So as an undergraduate student, I’ve been seeing a lot of my peers being just really worried about what their job prospects are going to look like in the future, especially like my computer science friends or any of my friends who are in more art fields, such as graphic design. I personally hope to go to graduate school and pursue my PhD in psychology after my undergraduate.
So I don’t feel as worried that my jobs at the moment will be replaced by AI. But I definitely believe that this is going to be such a large problem that doesn’t just affect entry-level white-collar jobs, as we’ve been seeing so far, such as with Amazon replacing tens of thousands of employees. But I do think that this is going to impact just so many different types of work.
And we are going to need to have to learn how to adapt from that.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Yeah. And Dr. Thornton, I mean, Stephanie brings a pretty interesting perspective, someone going through the process, as she was just talking about. But there’s actually a disorder or a dysfunction related to AI.
A lot of people have this angst, and it cuts, as Stephanie said, it really cuts across the socioeconomic divide. I mean, you could be an executive in a corporate job. You could be a part of a manufacturing organization.
It really cuts across every part of American society.
Joseph Thornton, MD, University of Florida
That’s correct. And so Stephanie actually approached me. She was thinking about this, and I sort of helped make it a little more concrete and description.
But yes, if you have what we call a knowledge job, if your job is behind a computer screen, it’s vulnerable to being done by AI, maybe not the entire job, but a large percentage. And so what we see happening is maybe they’re not doing as extensive layoffs, but they’re not replacing people. And in fact, there’s somewhat notion, when we get a vacancy now at the university, it’s not an automatic refill.
You have to justify why do you need a human being to do this job. And as professionals, we’re used to being self-sufficient, self-driven. We saw it in COVID when people got laid off.
There was extended periods of time, and it would just sort of start grinding them down where, what’s wrong with me? And it’s not what’s wrong with me. It’s what’s happening in our society that’s different.
And that’s what we wanted to call attention to is clinicians might be, we might see the canaries in the coal mine, so to speak. So we’ll see people who start having this angst, but it’s not something that’s going to get better with a bill. We have to restructure our society.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Stephanie, how are your friends dealing with this? I mean, how are they preparing? If they’re coders, they’re computer science majors, I would argue that you need, there’s a qualitative element to it, but how are they dealing with, the thought is that each successive generation does better than the previous generation.
So how are they coping with this thought, this unease?
Stephanie McNamara, University of Florida
Yeah, I think that a lot people are starting to try to really learn and master the AI tools rather than just saying, oh, I’m just going to continue on my degree path as I should. They’re really trying to learn how to use those AI tools so that if they aren’t able to find a job in their respective fields, maybe they could find a job training these AI models or building these tools. And I think that’s going to introduce a lot of different jobs that may be, we are definitely going to lose a lot of jobs, but I think we are going to gain a lot as well in training and building AI models.
So a lot of my friends, even if they aren’t in the computer science or engineering fields, they’re starting to explore that possibility more because they know that many jobs will be created because of it.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
And thank you for that, Stephanie. And Dr. Thornton, as we close out the discussion, how about someone who’s in mid-career? Someone like myself, someone like you, we’ve got extensive experience.
How do we adjust? It’s hard for us, I’m going to call myself mature, mature work to adapt, but you actually have to force yourself to, you’re not going to change reality. So you’ve got to kind of come to the realization, but what’s the best practice for us to set aside our unease and kind of get to that next phase in our job life?
Joseph Thornton, MD, University of Florida
Well, my advice will be speculative because we don’t actually have experience and outcomes, but from the sources I hear, one is number one, be prepared, understand that there may be changes coming in your life, watch what’s happening within your organization and how you can use AI tools to sort of make yourself more difficult to replace or more more integral into the changes they’re making. The other is to, they say a large number of the jobs, it won’t be jobs per se, but it’ll be an entrepreneur environment. So how can you do gig work or what can you do in using the tools to be able to get a part-time job or part-time work as a hedge?
But to know that there’s coming and also to engage your elected officials, your professional organization officials, that we need to do something different to society. We talk about unemployment insurance, but that needs to be really rethought and revamped up because our society is dependent on us to spend money. No one gets rich if you don’t spend money and it’s actually cheaper for them to give you money to spend than it is to just watch your funds dry up.
But that’s a hard change of thought for people to accept and it affects our self-esteem, but we’ve got to start thinking in those lines.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Yeah, it’s almost like a patchwork quilt, if you will, of we’re talking about the gig economy, trying to kind of piece together a career or a future version of your career. Dr. Thornton, Stephanie, we’re going to have to leave it there. Great research.
Thanks for joining us and we look forward to having you back on the program again very soon. Thank you so much.
Joseph Thornton, MD, University of Florida
Thank you so much.
