Will ChatGPT Take Our Jobs And Make Stock Trading Obsolete?

Disclaimer: financial information is not financial advice. This post is for informational purposes only.

There is a rising fear circulating on the internet, on various forums and big tech platforms, discussing whether ChatGPT is here to "take over" and replace everyone's jobs.

Are those fears justifiable and warranted? Is anyone safe from the powerful ChatGPT software? What jobs, if any, are safe?

One type of profession that will likely remain untouchable, to being rendered obsolete by AI, is stock trading. But before I explain why I don't believe ChatGPT will make stock traders obsolete, let me briefly explain what ChatGPT is.

What Is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a chatbot, developed by OpenAI, that generates a text response to your plain text request.

Simply put, ChatGPT is good at creating a response to your text input.

It generates a response to your text by using a probability distribution to choose the best "guess" and predict what a desirable response to your text may be.

To give you a more in-depth answer to what this fancy new AI/ML (artificial intelligence and machine learning) tool is, I asked ChatGPT itself what it is, and this is the response it gave me:

ChatGPT is a conversational language model developed by OpenAI. It is based on the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) architecture and fine-tuned on conversational data to generate human-like responses in a dialogue setting. It can be used for various natural language processing tasks such as question answering, language translation, text summarization, and text generation. – ChatGPT

A Revolutionary Industry Disrupter

As someone with a background in Computer Science and professional software development experience, but no working experience in AI/ML (disclaimer), I understand the circulating fears in how the ChatGPT tool, and AI/ML in general, albeit at a high-level, may disrupt many industries and sectors.

The recent advancements in AI/ML, such as with ChatGPT, make it more apparent that the next major revolution, that may change our world as we know it, is likely in the AI space.

AI is likely to be the next technological advancement to revolutionize industries. Similarly to how the steam engine revolutionized industries of its time, followed by the radio, the airplane, the TV, computers, internet, smartphones, social media, and now (or soon to be) AI/ML.

Is ChatGPT Going To Take Our Jobs?

So what does this mean for our jobs and careers? Will AI/ML tools, like ChatGPT, make us redundant and obsolete? Will it take our jobs?

I don't believe so, because even if it were possible, as the tech advances, I think that we would want to limit its ability and what we use it for.

For example, if this technology starts to take everyone's jobs, unemployment levels would likely surpass that of the Great Depression, when at its peak in 1933, 24.9% of the workforce was unemployed. And if that happens, then the stock market would collapse, since stock prices typically rise when unemployment numbers are low, and prices fall when they are high.

If stocks tank in price, companies lose their value, which results in a domino effect of companies downsizing, which further adds to the unemployment number.

That type of downsizing typically occurs because business executives, at companies which have shareholders/investors, have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to put their client's interests ahead of theirs.

A shareholder desires their stock to appreciate in value, so a business leader puts that interest ahead of theirs and takes actions to make the company look better on appear, to make the financial numbers look better by taking such actions as letting people go.

By laying off staff or firing people, executives lower the company's operational costs and therefore improve financial metrics, such as profit margin and free cash flow, which then makes the company appear to be a better investment "on paper," in the short-term at least.

When a company's financial metrics look better on the next quarterly financial report (e.g., balance sheet, cash flow statement, income statement, etc.), investors are more likely to buy the stock, which then increases its value (due to the increased demand and limited supply shares for sale).

Even if ChatGPT were to take our jobs, because companies replace most of their employees with AI/ML tools like ChatGPT, it would be the end for most of these companies stock prices. Because massive layoffs, that have never been seen before, would raise unemployment numbers significantly, and then nobody would be buying or using company goods or services, because we would all be broke!

To whom would these companies be making goods and services for, if most people are unemployed and don't have an income, and therefore cannot buy a company's products or services? Such a scenario would likely bring the capitalism economic model to an end, and then a new economic model, or existing model, would have to replace it.

If that scenario starts to become reality, I think people would begin to vote or pressure their politicians to place limits on what AI is allowed to do.

Would we want to live in a world where AI replaces us? Just because we could use that tech to replace most jobs and workers, would we want to do that? Have the economic models advanced enough, or are they significantly lagging behind the lightning fast technological advancements? I don't think we are ready to allow AI take our jobs.

What ChatGPT Says About Taking Our Jobs

I asked ChatGPT what it thinks on the matter. I asked if it'll take our jobs, and this is the response it spat out:

ChatGPT and other language models like it have the potential to automate certain tasks that are currently performed by humans, such as customer service interactions and data entry. However, it's worth noting that these models are not capable of replacing the full range of human capabilities, and many jobs involve tasks that language models can not perform, such as complex reasoning, creativity, and decision making in open-ended situations. Additionally, language models are not designed to replace jobs, but to help humans to be more efficient and effective in performing their tasks.

It's also important to consider the ethical implications of using language models in certain contexts, and to ensure that their use is done in a fair and responsible manner. It's important to consider the potential impact on workers and communities and to work to mitigate any negative effects.

It is more likely that AI and ChatGPT specifically, will augment human capabilities and make jobs more efficient, rather than replacing them entirely.

Will ChatGPT Replace Stock Traders?

As ChatGPT mentioned above, jobs that require complex reasoning, creativity, and decision making in open-ended situations, are ones that it can not perform.

Stock traders buy and sell stocks to make money in the stock market. The nature of the stock market is one that is unpredictable (at least not with 100% accuracy). A certainty in the stock market is that prices will fluctuate, often times randomly.

Price predictions and the direction of a stock's price movement can not be predicted with 100% accuracy, because of unknown variables, random factors that affect companies, the emotional nature of stock traders and their irrational buying and selling of stocks.

As long as humans continue to trade stocks, the stock market will remain irrational and unpredictable (at least not with 100% prediction accuracy.)

Because of those reasons, stock trading and stock traders won't be replaced by AI/ML tools like ChatGPT.

Stock market prediction models typically rely on historical datasets, such as price data and financial data, to make price target predictions. However, since past performance doesn't guarantee future performance, such prediction models require new data to retrain and fine-tune their prediction models.

In my opinion, the stock market isn't totally random (although some may disagree; see Random Walk Hypothesis) and therefore it has some degree of predictability to it. A degree of predictability allows high probability traders and professional trading firms to make consistent profits.

Predicting price movements over the short-term, during intraday trading, is more difficult because there is a lot more volatility due to random market noise. The more randomness involved, the more difficult it is to predict accurately, with high probability, the price direction of a stock.

At Stocksift, we believe in swing trading, because it is a way to trade stocks and attempt to outperform the market and investors that have a buy and hold strategy.

Swing trading is a short-term trading strategy where traders typically hold a position for a few days to a few weeks. It is a good trade-off between intraday (day trading) volatility over the very short-term and investing over the long-term.

With swing trading, there is less volatility and randomness than day trading, so trading takes place over a longer period of time, which makes it easier to predict the price movements with higher accuracy. By avoiding most of the intraday market noise and randomness that is encountered while day trading, a swing trader is able to use high probability trading to make consistent profits.

Should You Become A Stock Trader?

As AI/ML tools like ChatGPT emerge, and begin to threaten many careers and jobs with automation and obsoletion, it may be of interest to look into trading stocks.

Investing and trading stocks are ways to make your money work for you.

One reason that people don't invest their money in the stock market is because they are trying to time the market. They are waiting to enter the market when prices are low, because buying low and selling high is the concept on how you profit and make money in the stock market.

However, the problem with waiting to enter the market, is that you may be waiting for a very long time.

People don't invest due to fear (an emotion), and making business or financial decisions based on an emotion are usually not the best idea. They are afraid that they will lose money the moment they buy a stock. But by not investing, or trading, most people will take a guaranteed loss on their money due to something called inflation (at least in an inflationary economy, rather than deflationary.)

Of course, it should be noted that trading and investing involves risk, where you may lose money or the entire investment. But that is why trading smart, trading objectively rather than emotionally, and with high probability is what we focus on at Stocksift.

At Stocksift, we built a stock trading simulator, that lets you practice trading stocks for free, without having to risk your real money, so you can get good at stock trading risk-free by using a concept called paper trading within our simulator.

By creating a free account at Stocksift, you are also able to join our stock market game that lets you compete against other players in our stock trading tournaments. which uses our stock trading simulator.

If you are curious about trading stocks, we recommend trying Stocksift, which has other tools, such as a stock screener, and backtesting features to help you find stocks to trade and create a high probability stock trading strategy that is tested over historical data.

Conclusion

AI/ML tools like ChatGPT will likely revolutionize industries and automate certain tasks and take jobs from some people.

Don't fret or worry too much, as we will have to wait and see where this technology leads us. If things get really bad, in terms of unemployment, due to AI taking all of our jobs, well, then at least we will all likely be there together in the unemployment line! Being unemployed would allow us plenty of time to sit around and watch where this new technology goes!

Careers and jobs that require complex reasoning, creativity, and decision making in open-ended situations, are ones that are safe from AI and ChatGPT takeover.

The stock market has a degree of randomness to it, so AI/ML prediction tools and ChatGPT won't be able to create perfect prediction models that have 100% accuracy. Which means that human stock traders will be able to continue partaking in the stock market to try and beat the market.