Will artificial intelligence wipe out the world’s white-collar jobs?
Reid Hoffman, venture capitalist and co-founder of LinkedIn, says reports of this coming “bloodbath” have been somewhat exaggerated.
In an interview with Fast Company Tuesday (June 17), Hoffman was asked about claims by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei that people were underestimating AI’s impact on work.
“Dario is right that over, call it, a decade or three, that it will do a massive set of job transformation,” Hoffman said. “And some of that job transformation will be replacement issues.”
He likened it to the advent of programs like Microsoft Excel, which took away some of the functions of an account’s job without eliminating accounting as a profession. While he predicted a “massive tsunami of transformation,” Hoffman also said that “person plus AI doing things” would be the paradigm for at least the next several years.
“Could I just replace, for example, my accountants with GPT-4? The answer is absolutely not. That would be a disastrous mistake,” Hoffman said. “And it’s just simply like saying, also, let’s replace my marketing department or my sales department with GPT-4. Absolutely not.”
He added that these departments should experiment with AI models like ChatGPT, and that while these tools can amplify their work, “that’s nowhere close to a bloodbath.”
Some jobs are likely to be replaced, he said: the ones “where we’re trying to program human beings to act like robots,” such as customer service workers required to follow a script.
“But even then, it’s unclear that that will be a bloodbath, because of the question of what the adoption of companies looks like—how it’s refined in even with massive transformation, that will happen in a relatively short time frame,” said Hoffman.
The interview came the same day that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy shared a message with employees which noted that the company’s corporate workforce is likely to shrink over the next few years as the tech giant adopts AI.
“Those who embrace this change, become conversant in AI, help us build and improve our AI capabilities internally and deliver for customers, will be well-positioned to have high impact and help us reinvent the company,” Jassy wrote.
Meanwhile, research by PYMNTS Intelligence finds that 54% of workers say that generative AI poses a “significant risk of widespread job displacement.” This concern was more prevalent among workers who were familiar with generative AI platforms at 57%, while just 41% of those unfamiliar with AI platforms expressed similar concerns.