Any student of predictions will tell you they are almost always wrong, especially the ones about the future.Most predictions about AI will be too.
Thanks to our prehistoric brains, humanity has a demonstrated capacity to ignore the 99 out of 100 predictions that are wrong and to focus instead on that one guy out of 100 who accidentally got it right.
Everybody remembers how Michael Burry successfully predicted the Global Financial Crisis and profited from it, as shown in the movie The Big Short.
Nobody remembers he gave similar predictions of impending financial doom in 2015, 2017, 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2023.
Research also shows that the more confident and emphatic someone is about their prediction, the more likely they are to be wrong. So it’s worth being extremely skeptical of anyone predicting massive layoffs and population collapse from AI, or some future utopia where everyone is somehow rich after being “freed” from the drudgery of work by the robots.
What invariably happens is a bunch of developments that nobody really considered, but which seems obvious in hindsight.
With that in mind, here’s the future of work and AI according to “experts.” If you want to skip the doom and gloom stuff you can skip ahead to PWC’s positive research into our AI jobs future by clicking here.
Global population collapse from the AI Job-ocalypse
Tabloid newspapers, including The Sun and the New York Post, ran breathless claims this week from an “Oklahoma tech expert” predicting that job losses caused by AI will cause a global population collapse from 8 billion to 100 million by the year 2300.
Subhash Kak, who teaches computer science at Oklahoma State University, claimed the impact of AI on employment was “going to be devastating for society and world society.”
His argument is that birth rates will plummet after AI and robots take all the jobs because no one will be able to afford to have kids — especially kids who will be unemployed and never leave home.
“There are demographers who are suggesting that as a consequence, the world population will collapse, and it could go down to as low as just 100 million people on the entire planet Earth in 2300 or 2380,” he said.
“I have all the data in the book. This is not just my personal opinion,” he said. Actually, it’s not just his personal opinion; it’s also a shameless plug for his book Age of Artificial Intelligence.
Kak, who received his engineering degree in 1970, does have some runs on the AI board relating to neural networks and training algorithms, but he has advanced highly questionable theories before about uncovering the laws of science through Yogic meditation and enlightenment.
AI job losses are a big concern
While predictions of global population collapse sound far-fetched, a lot of very smart people are very concerned about job losses connected to AI, including your AI Eye columnist who just took out a large mortgage.
Figures as diverse as Barack Obama and Steve Bannon have raised the issue, particularly in light of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s recent prediction that AI could wipe out half of entry level white collar jobs within five years and see unemployment spike to 10-20%.
“Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen,” Amodei told Axios. “It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it.”
On the upside, he said AI might also cure cancer and balance the US budget. So I guess the future unemployed people might just have to take one for the team.
There are already some worrying signs. Unemployment for recent US college graduates has jumped to an unusually high 5.8%, and those most affected are concentrated in fields like finance and computer science where AI has already been widely deployed.
“There are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates,” Oxford Economics wrote in a recent report.
Signalfire also reports that new hire software engineers with less than a year of experience fell by 24% in 2024.
Workers benefit from using AI in their jobs too
A survey of US workers by Pew Charitable Trusts found that 42.3% are now using generative AI at work. They report using it for about a third of tasks, resulting in a tripling of productivity (that is, they could do something that normally took 90 minutes, in about half an hour).
A separate survey at the end of last year found that companies report they are only seeing small to moderate gains so far from AI use, and no major impact on wages or hours worked. But as the PWC report below found, that seems to be changing quickly.
Also read: AI cures blindness, ‘good’ propaganda bots, OpenAI doomsday bunker
PWC finds AI jobs future…
cointelegraph.com