That has changed. We stopped laughing when we realized that chatbots like ChatGPT and other AI implementations unleashed since could write coherent sentences, paint pictures, create make-believe photographs or compose music better than us.

Not a day goes by without dozens of stories published around the world about AI as we grapple with the fact that what we thought would happen in the future has happened already, largely behind the scenes. Governments, too, are trying to get a grip on runaway technology. The European Union is devising a law to box in generative AI, citing privacy concerns.

For most people, however, the thought of AI taking their jobs is far scarier than that of AI taking their data. Granted, some also worry about AI going rogue and declaring war on us all, a bit like in the Terminator movies, but the most obvious threat in the near future is simply that AI can make many of us redundant in the workplace, threatening livelihoods.

Automation has already eliminated hundreds of millions of jobs in the manufacturing industry as robotic arms work on assembly lines in shiny factories devoid of workers, raising doubts about the future of mass employment in the secondary sector. The primary sector, too, will require less and less human input as autonomous tractors and agricultural drones can work on fields at any time of day.

We have accepted that most of us will eventually work in the tertiary sector, but now AI is coming for white-collar workers as well.

We had considered service industry jobs more future-proof because we assumed we had an edge over technology when it came to creativity and the arts. Now, we are wondering whether that is true, and we are pondering what creativity even is, given that machines are giving us a run for our money in that department, too.

Let us not kid ourselves, there is no putting this genie back in its bottle. AI will not be stopped; it will only get stronger, and regulators will have to respond to the challenge – most importantly with regard to employment.

The very company that created ChatGPT, OpenAI, said 80 percent of all workers could see their jobs impacted by AI to some extent. Many professions will disappear entirely.

With the help of machines, we can either produce more with the same labor, or work less for the same output or a bit of both. Labor productivity has been growing for centuries, but AI is supercharging that process.

A global debate on reducing work hours has never been more pertinent than now.

For Indonesia, meanwhile, it is vital to realize that we cannot follow the well-trodden path of development pursued by emerging economies before us. East Asian countries from Japan and Korea to China all capitalized on the fact that their workers could undercut their counterparts in more developed economies in terms of wages.

However, as machines do more and more of the work, cheap labor is less and less of a selling point when it comes to attracting foreign investment. Other cost factors, notably energy prices, become more significant.

Most importantly, the government must redouble its effort to increase human capital, so that more Indonesians will find jobs that survive automation – at least a little longer.

Encouraging more investment in tertiary education is crucial, particularly in courses on AI, machine learning and cloud computing, so that we can leverage for our own benefit the inevitable technological revolution that AI is forcing upon us.