AI could devalue your degree, federal government warns
A university degree could become less valuable for job security in the age of AI, as finance workers worry AI could steal their jobs, an influential member of the government’s economic team suggests.
Judgment rather than formal education may be a greater indicator of success, deputy productivity minister Andrew Leigh will say in Brisbane on Tuesday.
Former economics professor Dr. D., who has written extensively on innovation and inequality. Leigh argues that universities and employers need to rethink assessment and recruitment as AI erodes the value placed on cognitive expertise.
“Rather than formal skill categories such as school leaving, vocational qualifications and university degrees, the more meaningful distinction in the future may be differences in the type of cognition performed,” he will say.
“Potentially, the important distinction might be judgment versus execution, surveillance versus production, or conceptual reasoning versus procedural cognition.”
While school leavers in the past have been encouraged to pursue a degree in coding, Dr Leigh says “meta skills” (framing problems, identifying errors, distracting and holding responsibility) will become the qualities most valued by employers.
This has consequences for inequality.
New technologies have tended to increase the importance of educational attainment in improving wage outcomes by increasing the relative demand for cognitive skills by complementing skilled labor while eliminating less-skilled labor.
But Dr Leigh argues that AI threatens to automate non-routine aspects of cognitive work, such as drafting text and writing code, disproportionately increasing the productivity of underperforming workers.
“The disparity may have less to do with years of training and more to do with whether someone takes on a judgment-heavy role.”
Early evidence suggests that white-collar workers are most at risk of AI layoffs.
Hundreds of jobs have been lost in recent weeks at Australian tech companies Atlassian and WiseTech and the Commonwealth Bank, which bosses have pinned on tech.
Financial Industry Association national secretary Julia Angrisano told the Australian Financial Review Banking Summit on Monday that bank workers were feeling “incredibly nervous” about their future as AI restructured the workforce.
Westpac CEO Anthony Miller said at the summit that there is a risk that job security may change due to artificial intelligence, but there will still be high demand for skilled workers from employers.
“There are so many skills that you may not need moving forward, and the ability of AI to do things that a highly skilled coder can do shows that a lot of roles are going to change there,” he said.
“But equally, a highly skilled engineer and coder has a certain mind, a certain intelligence, and a certain skill that we can reuse in other areas.”
