In Davos, warnings about AI and jobs

The impact of AI on the labor market is more serious than previously expected, with entry-level jobs collapsing and white-collar jobs in danger, participants at the World Economic Forum (WEF) said last week.

“We expect over the next years, in advanced economies, 60% of jobs to be affected by AI either enhanced or eliminated or transformed, 40% globally. This is like a tsunami hitting the labor market,” Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), said during a panel discussion on the global economic outlook.

Young people searching for jobs will find it harder to get a good placement. “Wake up. AI is for real, and it is transforming our world faster than we are getting [it] handled,” Georgieva said.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, was also blunt.

Half of entry-level white-collar jobs could be gone in “one to five years — [the prediction] as of six months ago, I would stick with that,” Amodei said, during a panel session focused on “The Day after AGI.”

White-collar jobs, which include knowledge workers and professionals in software, finance, research and science, will be affected, too. “I think maybe we’re starting to see just the little beginnings of it in software and coding,” Amodei said.

At Anthropic, Amodei said he envision a time when the company needs less people in junior and intermediate positions. “We’re thinking about how to deal with that within Anthropic in a sensible way,” he said.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp echoed that sentiment, saying after white-collar jobs are hit,  vocational jobs will become more valuable.

Vocational technicians, for instance, will still be needed to make batteries, but it’ll be harder for someone skilled in philosophy to find work, he said, noting he has an undergraduate degree in philosophy. 

“You hopefully have some other skill,” Karp explained in a fireside chat. “That one [a philosophy degree] is going to be hard to market.”

Those views dovetail with a Microsoft research study in December that said AI could affect information workers. Professions requiring manual labor, such as operating machinery, helpers and others, are least likely to be affected by AI — but they could see downward pressure on pay.

Jobs that require AI skills are getting much higher pay and raises, with salaries often  stagnant for jobs untouched by AI. “The jobs that are not touched…, they are kind of the same, they are paying now less,” the IMF’s Georgieva said. “So, the middle class inevitably is going to be affected.

“If adoption of AI is not relatively equal, we’re going to create more inequalities,” Georgieva said.

Even so, the ongoing AI infrastructure buildout will create new jobs, especially in  developing countries in areas such as energy, construction, telecom and maintenance, panelists said in a session titled “A Coming Jobs Challenge in Emerging Markets?” 

Professional labor has matured in developed markets such as the US and Europe, which is why those areas face a larger risk of job losses to AI. But the situation is different elsewhere.

“We cannot allow the jobs debacle to … widen the equity gap,” said Taufik Tengku Aziz, CEO of Malaysian oil company Petronas. The company is now working with the Malaysian government to make the country’s population AI literate.

“We don’t necessarily believe…AI will displace people. But companies without AI will do damage to [their] own people as we move forward,” Aziz said.

The participants at WEF panels were not all gloomy about how AI will affect jobs. They noted the impact of AI still can’t be easily measured — and its benefits might yet  outweigh any job losses. It could also create new careers.

As with any new breakthrough technology, “some jobs will get disrupted, but I think new, even more valuable — perhaps more meaningful — jobs will get created,” said Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google Deepmind.

In its December study, Microsoft noted how the arrival of ATMs actually created more work for bank tellers instead of replacing them. Banks wound up hiring more tellers to focus on higher-value work.

“Banks opened more branches at lower costs and tellers focused on more valuable relationship-building rather than processing deposits and withdrawals,” the researchers said in the study.

AI can also be seen as plus in some industries. Pfizer CEO AIbert Bourla, for example, sees AI as improving productivity across all sectors, and noted drug discovery and better health outcomes as examples of where the technology has been a boon.

“Are you asking me if in our labs maybe we could do the job with less scientists? Probably,” Bourla said. But Pfizer’s focus for now is on doing more with the same level of investments, he said.French authorities to ban Teams, Zoom, other video apps for gov’t use – ComputerworldRead More