AI and the future of employment
We ChatGPT with Johnny Långstedt, PhD, about how intelligent technologies affect the workplace
With recent developments in technology, and interest in new artificial intelligence (AI) like ChatGPT, we chatted with researcher Johnny Långstedt to get his insights on these latest developments in relation to his research.
Johnny published his article, How will our Values Fit Future Work? An Empirical Exploration of Basic Values and Susceptibility to Automation, in our Labour and Industry journal. He published his work open access (OA), making it free to read for all, as part of the FinELib agreement between Finnish institutions and Taylor & Francis. You can read more about this agreement here.

Johnny Långstedt, PhD. Åbo Akademi University, Finland. Author of ‘How will our values fit future work? An Empirical Exploration of Basic Values and Susceptibility to Automation’.
Please introduce yourself and your research
What got you interested in this aspect of society and technology in general?
Was the choice to publish OA immediate?
In your opinion, what are the benefits of publishing research OA?

What conclusions did you make in your research? What do you want readers to take away from it?
With the recent launch of ChatGPT, we’d love to know your thoughts on this and what you think this means for the future of employment?
This is a tricky question! I have not tested the commercial version of ChatGPT, and I did not find the free version particularly impressive. It works really well for creating abstracts – so it will at least save me some hours of work!
I’m less concerned about it’s impact on future employment and more concerned about how it will affect our ability to express ourselves in written language. There’s already signs of social media having a negative impact on our writing. How bad will it get if we rely on a machine to generate our text? A slight de-skilling seems plausible, if not imminent. Generative language models can be a valuable tool in teaching, research, and many other fields – I’m certain of it. But I believe it’s augmenting rather than replacing technology as it still often requires a human finish.