Featured Image Credit: Yuichiro Chino / Getty
One former AI insider has revealed a shocking revelation he learned from his old job, as he warns everyone to 'adopt AI or die' in the midst of a fundamental shift in how employment works thanks to the emergent technology.
Everyone's aware that one of the biggest threats arriving in tandem with artificial intelligence is to people's jobs, as not only have countless roles already been made redundant due to advancements in the tech, but some of the most powerful figures predict that only a handful of jobs will survive the 'revolution'.
While it might struggle to challenge the ethical and regulatory conditions of one major employment area, and there remain some jobs that we would rather keep exclusive to humans, the vast majority of people are likely to suffer in some capacity from the widespread adoption of AI.
Countless warnings have emerged from experts within the industry as to how bad this will become for people in the near future, and one former AI insider has added his own perspective after training tools explicitly designed to replace people's jobs.
Advert
As reported by ABC News, Donald King used to work for leading consultancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), where his role as an associate consultant was within the company's 'AI Factory', building autonomous agents for other companies.
He initially thought that this role was a 'dream job', but encountered a 'moral dilemma' after discovering what his work would actually be doing as the goal of his team was to automate at least 30% of work involved in routine office tasks.
"We were working with a large telecom company and we built 45 AI agents that were working together. We made a Microsoft Teams agent that was pretending to be human to update the team," King explains, outlining a rather dystopian future that is increasingly seeping into the present.
Although he has expressed a "little bit of guilt" regarding his involvement in the work before being laid off by the company in 2024, King has issued a warning to both individuals and companies that adopting AI is a necessity if you want to survive in the modern workplace.
"In reality, it's like when Excel was invented or Google was invented, it didn't replace anyone's jobs. It just raised the bar on output for everyone," he speculated.
"If you're using AI you're going to 10-times your output. If you're not using AI, you're falling behind. That applies for the businesses as well. If the business is using AI [...] they're going to have better profit margins, they're going to have better earnings. If you're not, you're going to die."
What that means for the long-term consequences of employment – and the world as a whole – is frightening to consider, as some experts speculate it could lead to a catastrophic gap in wealth between the richest and poorest individuals and a world full of people unable to support themselves while a few companies get rich off of automation.
