Sam Altman reveals one job AI will likely take over and one it may never touch

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has talked about the jobs that could be lost due to the rise of artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT. While admitting that he can't fully predict the future in this area, Altman said that he is ‘confident’ about some jobs being lost due to AI, while also noting that some areas could stay resistant to AI advancements.

Speaking on "The Tucker Carlson Show," Altman said, “I'll caveat this with the obvious but important statement that no one can predict the future. If I try to answer that precisely, I will say a lot of dumb things, but I'll try to pick an area that I'm confident about and then areas that I'm much less confident about.”

“I'm confident that a lot of current customer support that happens over a phone or computer, those people will lose their jobs, and that'll be better done by an AI. Now, there may be other kinds of customer support where you really want to know it's the right person,” he added.

Will coders lose jobs due to AI?

Altman also said that he isn't certain about what the future could hold for computer programmers. Notably, a lot of AI companies have developed features that now allow even non-coders to generate websites or games by using just a natural language prompt, which has led to mass hysteria about what the future could hold for the field.

“A job that I feel way less certain about what the future looks like for is computer programmers. What it means to be a computer programmer today is very different than what it meant two years ago. You're able to use these AI tools to just be hugely more productive,” he said.

“It turns out that the world wanted so much more software than the world previously had the capacity to create, that there's just incredible demand overhang. But if we fast forward another 5 or 10 years, what does that look like? Is it more jobs or less? That one I'm uncertain on,” Altman added.

One job that may not be affected by AI:

Altman then shared the example of a profession like nursing that isn't likely to be affected by AI due to the amount of human connection involved in that role.

“A job that I'm confident will not be that impacted is like nurses. I think people really want the deep human connection with a person… No matter how good the advice of the AI is or the robot or whatever. You'll really want that,” Altman added.

The OpenAI CEO isn't the first one to point out the so-called non-impact of AI on roles that involve a high level of human empathy. Earlier this year, in a conversation with WIRED, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis had made a similar argument, stating that while AI might be able to replace doctors at some point, that might not be the case for nurses.

“You know, I sometimes give this example of doctors and nurses. Maybe a doctor and what the doctor does and the diagnosis, one could imagine that being helped by an AI tool or even having an AI kind of doctor. On the other hand, like nursing, you know, I don't think you'd want a robot to do that. I think there's something about the human empathy aspect of that and the care that's particularly humanistic,” Hassabis told the publication.