Will artificial intelligence (AI) take my job? This question is really starting to preoccupy me and millions of other white-collar workers. There is even a word for it — FOBO, or fear of becoming obsolete — and, regrettably, our apprehension is not entirely unfounded.
While I am not counseling panic, I do think knowledge workers — a catch-all term for people such as administrators, financial analysts, software developers, legal professionals and those in the creative industries whose jobs are most likely to be transformed by AI — should prepare for massive upheaval. This means embracing AI to become more productive, while having a backup plan in case your efforts to resist the march of the machines fail.
Until recently, I was tempted to dismiss chatbots as gimmicky, error-prone stochastic parrots; the latest versions, however, can reason and solve complex problems, and their answers are often indistinguishable from a human’s. Their capabilities keep getting better, while the costs of using AI continue to fall.
Illustration: Yusha
Previous advances in automation and outsourcing mainly affected blue-collar employees. This time it is those cossetted professionals who tap away at keyboards in offices — or work from home — who are most at risk of being displaced.
The psychological blow of devaluing brainwork and specialist knowledge is heavy enough — what was the point of all those college degrees or learning a foreign language, one might ask? However, the financial toll could be worse.
Knowledge workers often marry each other, a phenomenon known as assortative mating. Previously, the concern was that this trend increases inequality; now, it leaves those families doubly exposed to the AI chopping block.
Think tank IPPR estimates that knowledge work now accounts for about half of UK labor market activity, and as much as 70 percent of those tasks could be significantly transformed or replaced by generative AI. Those earning more than US$250,000 a year contribute about half of US consumer spending, according to a recent Moody’s Analytics analysis. What if millions of high earners are replaced by algorithms?
While he is not an unbiased observer, OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman said a software engineering agent will eventually be capable of doing most things that a human engineer with several years of experience can do, albeit with supervision. And “eventually” might be quite soon: Meta Platforms Inc boss Mark Zuckerberg said these virtual coworkers would have the coding and problem-solving abilities of a mid-level engineer by this year.
Unlike people, AI agents can be deployed at near limitless scale across all kinds of knowledge work. So while AI will certainly augment existing roles and create entirely new occupations, I think lots of job losses are inevitable (and Altman agrees). There is already talk of a white-collar recession as graduates from top MBA programs struggle to find work, translator commissions are drying up, starting salaries for consultants stagnate and layoffs in information technology increase.
Salesforce Inc said it would not hire any software engineers this year thanks to productivity advances from AI tools; Nvidia Corp would soon require all its software engineers to use AI agents, while more than one quarter of new code at Alphabet Inc’s Google is now generated by AI.
In banking, AI can draft almost all of an initial public offering’s prospectus in minutes, Goldman Sachs Group Inc CEO David Solomon said; previously, that might have taken a six-person team two weeks to produce.
Last month, Singapore bank DBS Group Holdings Ltd said it would cut about 4,000 contract and temporary staff in the next three years, as AI takes over their roles. If AI were poised to merely free us humans from dull, repetitive tasks, I would probably be less apprehensive. However, the latest AI models are capable of PhD level reasoning.
It makes sense to have a backup plan. The first step is to familiarize oneself with AI tools and become expert at using them; this should hopefully make you more productive and enable work that is more impactful. Doing so will also give you a better idea of whether your job is in danger, while offering some protection that you will not be among the first to get laid off. However, we will not all succeed in becoming AI managers — so keep networking on LinkedIn and elsewhere in case you do need a career lifeboat.
Those yet to join the workforce — or counseling their children — face difficult choices. Nvidia boss Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) last year sounded less convinced about the merits of learning to code, because soon everyone will be able to program using natural language (however, I tend to agree with Microsoft Corp founder Bill Gates that learning the basics is still important). Similarly, if AI chatbots start taking over all the grunt work in investment banking or management consultancy, getting a coveted internship or graduate program spot could become much harder.
Others further along in their careers should consider whether they have skills that open doors to a job or entrepreneurial opportunity that is not as susceptible to AI disruption. In other words, it is a good moment to perfect that side hustle. While I struggle to imagine doing anything other than journalism, I am half-convinced I would make a decent landscape gardener or barber, or failing that a cat cafe or cheese-shop owner (I’m only half-kidding).
As AI looks like being a lot kinder to capital owners than labor, another sensible move is to acquire more assets. An index fund provides exposure to companies that stand to profit from AI and related productivity gains and a hedge against being laid off (although the nosebleed valuation of some AI-linked firms indicate many folks have fully embraced this idea already).
Unfortunately, there is no guarantee AI will not steal your knowledge-worker job — but having a backup plan can at least help keep the FOBO at bay.
Chris Bryant is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering industrial companies in Europe. Previously, he was a reporter for the Financial Times. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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