Featured Image Credit: Ramsey Cardy / Contributor via Getty
Being an adult is hard, and while school might not have been the greatest time for all of us, many would rather go back to the classroom and frolic at playtime rather than being chained to their desk for 40 hours a week as part of the 9-to-5.
Still, it could always be worse, and as well as a growing number of tech companies adopting the brutal 996 regime, you should also be thankful you have a job at all. As we've recently seen with some 9,000 Microsoft workers being laid off, a slew of publishers going bump, and general redundancies in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, we're pretty sure you wouldn't be complaining about your job if you suddenly found yourself without it.
With the rise of artificial intelligence being blamed for a whole host of these layoffs, and Microsoft controversially announcing an $80 billion investment into AI, there are obvious concerns that humans will soon be replaced.
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Tech maestro Bill Gates has already warned that only one job might be safe from AI, and while Gates predicts some dystopian future where we'll get to work less and play more, we're left questioning how we're supposed to pay the bills.
One supposed AI expert has already foreshadowed graphic designers and video editors being out of work, whereas customer service representatives, those in data entry, and even writers (oh, great) are also said to be at great risk.
Now, the so-called 'Godfather of AI' has given his own grim prediction, with Geoffrey Hinton telling Steven Bartlett's Diary of a CEO podcast who he thinks could be on the chopping block. Although we hear a lot about the creative industries being affected, Hinton highlighted telemarketers and cold callers, junior legal and financial analysts, and customer service and marketing assistants. The Godfather of AI warned: "If I worked in a call center, I'd be terrified."
When Bartlett pushed on what kind of timeframe we could be facing for mass job losses, Hinton mused: "I think it's beginning to happen already, I read an article in The Atlantic recently that said it's already getting hard for university graduates to get jobs. And part of that may be that people are already using AI for the jobs they would have got."
Bartlett added that he spoke to the CEO of a major company who confirmed the workforce has already been slashed from 7,000 employees to 3,600, but by the end of the summer, it'll be 3,000 thanks to AI agents.
Elsewhere, Hinton suggested that legal assistants and paralegals won't be needed for 'very long', leading to a 'wealth inequality issue'. He concluded: "If you get a big increase in productivity, everybody should be better off. But if you can replace lots of people by AIs, then the people who get replaced will be worse off, and the company that supplies the AIs will be much better off, and the company that uses the AIs." In terms of who's 'safe', Hinton bizarrely pointed to plumbers as those who are least at risk. Something tells us there might be a sudden rush on tool belt orders and copies of Plumbing for Dummies.
