nice work if you can get it…
The job numbers released last month were the starkest and most sobering seen in decades. Unemployment has climbed to over five percent and one in six young people are officially unemployed, including over a million not in education or training. That’s enough to fill Wembley Stadium eleven times over. Even more worryingly is that 45% of 24 year-olds have never had a job, and if you’ve never had a job by that age it’s unlikely you ever will. Modern western society appears to be no place for young people. But is it any better for older ones?
The Artificial Intelligence jobs apocalypse, long and oft predicted, looks like it has finally started to happen.
In the age of early automation and computerisation, office workers were the acknowledged winners of globalisation and outsourcing, with whole swathes of blue-collar manufacturing jobs being hollowed out. However, the rise of AI, the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, is now afoot and it’s the turn of the university-educated, office-cubicle-dwelling, white-collar workers to feel the heat. Tech entrepreneur, Matt Shumer, has gone viral with his somewhat glib message of practicing using AI for the minimum of an hour each day to keep ahead of the approaching tsunami.
This year alone, US employers announced more than 108,000 job cuts, with lay-offs up over 200% since only last year. Amazon cut 16,000 jobs in a single month as it shifted towards AI-driven automation. Meta pruned a thousand from its virtual reality unit and Salesforce shed 4,000 from customer support. AI is suddenly very good at replacing previously valued skills and anyone in the ‘cognitive economy’, from software developers to salesmen, lawyers to auditors, accountants to graphic designers, copywriters to journalists are all worried they’re potentially going the way of the Blockbusters clerk. Microsoft’s AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, is predicting that “most white-collar work will be fully automated with the next 18 months”.
Research firm, Citrini, has kindly sketched out the falling dominos for us: software is the first to go as AI tools allow code to be designed and written at a fraction of current cost; automated customer support and service quickly follow suit as we eschew the wait for a real-life human interaction; next, millions of people using AI bots to handle their decisions decimate whole sections of the economy including insurance, travel and finance; payment systems will be ravaged as AI agents move to crypto to take advantage of lower transaction costs. The perfect storm now occurs as all these companies, from Mastercard to AIG, their business models ruined, shed even more workers and the vicious circle is complete.
Now, I fully concede that I, we, like the AI labs themselves cannot at this time foresee the future but it may not just be young people who are expected to survive on poorly-paid internships, zero-hour contracts in the gig-economy, street side-hustles and selling themselves on OnlyFans. The optimistic perspective is that the ‘centaur model’ – humans working with AI assistance – will prevail. Some predicted, for example, that radiologists would immediately become obsolete but, as it transpires, better AI tech has meant more, less-expensive, scans and more work for more radiologists. It’s at least something optimistic to cling to, as the apocalypse draws near!
