Amid growing concern about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on people’s jobs, a new study confirms the majority of Quebecers will be affected one way or another. According to the Institut de la statistique du Québec, approximately 59 per cent of the Quebec workforce have jobs with high exposure to AI, meaning it will change the way they work. “Women are more likely than men to be exposed to AI in their job (71% vs. 49%),” write the authors of the study. AI is expected to have a greater impact on office jobs, while manual labour jobs, like construction, will see less of an impact. “I think we were always more worried as a population about manual labour being more exposed to robot automation because it’s a more visual and traditional form of artificial intelligence,” said Rob Glew, assistant professor of data analytics and AI at McGill University. “It wasn’t really until that LLM [large language model], ChatGPT moment in 2023 when we all suddenly realized, oh no, the thing that will move fastest is the more cognitive tasks,” he said. Positive vs. negative impact It is not all negative, though. Of the jobs that are expected to see an impact, about half will likely benefit from the introduction of AI tools. For example, doctors who can rely on AI for note taking, freeing them up to see more patients. For the other half, however, AI threatens to transform or replace these types of jobs. “We think about a threat to accountants, copy editors, and paralegals,” said Glew, who is already seeing some of his students at McGill’s business school struggling to find entry-level positions. “It does raise concerns about how do you create senior-level expertise when you aren’t bringing in junior people,” he said. More education, more impact The study also finds the more education you have, the greater chance AI will impact your job. The study said 86 per cent of jobs that require a degree or higher are exposed to AI, versus just 34 per cent for jobs that require a high school diploma or less. For those highly-educated jobs, most will see a positive impact from AI whereas jobs requiring less education, the impact is expected to be mostly negative. Glew says all of this presents major challenges: estimates are 2.7 million jobs will be impacted one way or another in Quebec alone and retraining that many people to work with AI is easier said than done.
