The Fine Print We've Seen This Movie Before

The Fine Print We've Seen This Movie Before By Gary Payne, MBA Founder of FuneralCostOntario.ca If you grew up anywhere around Oshawa, the conversation about machines taking people's jobs has a familiar sound to it. Long before anybody was asking ChatGPT to write an email, people here were working beside machines that could weld, paint, move parts and do jobs once done by hand. By the mid-1980s, GM's Oshawa operations were becoming increasingly automated, and people worried about what that meant for the workers. They had good reason to. A machine could make the same weld over and over without getting tired. It could handle repetitive jobs and work around heat, fumes and conditions people were happy to avoid. But if the machine was doing the work, there was still the obvious question about the person who had been doing it before. That argument never really went away. What's changed is where the machines are showing up. Factory automation was easy to picture. You could see the robot on the plant floor moving steel or welding part of a car together. AI doesn't look like that. It may be sitting inside the same computer you've used for years. Someone in sales can use it to prepare for a meeting. A manager can hand it a spreadsheet and start asking questions that might once have taken an afternoon to answer. Nobody hears machinery running in the background. The work just gets done faster. That makes this round of automation different, especially for people who spent years believing machines were mainly a threat to factory jobs. Statistics Canada has estimated that roughly 60 per cent of Canadian employees could be highly exposed to AI-related changes in their work. That doesn't mean 60 per cent of jobs disappear. In many cases the technology may change the job rather than eliminate it. Oshawa has seen that before. Robots didn't bring an end to auto workers. They changed a lot of what those workers did. Somebody still had to operate the equipment, maintain it, solve problems and make decisions the machine couldn't make. When GM prepared the Oshawa plant for its 2021 restart, more than 1,200 new robots were installed. People and machines are still working in the same building. The office version of that relationship is only beginning. I've already seen it in my own work. A large part of compliance involves finding the right rule, checking the right document and making sure something hasn't been missed. There are days when the job feels less like solving a difficult problem and more like finding one sentence buried on page 47. AI can be very good at getting me to page 47. That doesn't mean I hand it a regulation and accept whatever comes back. I've spent enough time working in compliance to know that the difference between what sounds right and what's actually been checked is more or less the whole job. If something matters, I want to know where the answer came from. But if AI can get me to the right section in thirty seconds instead of twenty minutes, I'm going to use it. I suspect a lot of people will make the same calculation. The debate is often framed as humans versus machines, but workplaces are usually messier than that. Someone gets a new tool, figures out what it does well, and pretty quickly stops wanting to do the old job the old way. Some jobs will change dramatically and some will disappear. Pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone. But that isn't the same as saying everyone whose work can be touched by AI is about to be replaced by it. People in Oshawa have heard versions of that prediction before. They heard it as more robots arrived on the assembly line, and they watched the work change around them. This time the machine may not be behind a safety fence on a factory floor. It may be sitting beside us at the desk