No Jobs Are Safe From AI
No jobs are safe from AI. Some may be better insulated but AI is coming for everyone.
Exactly Which Jobs Will AI Take First?
July 17 (King World News) – Gerald Celente: AI will slash Amazon’s white-collar workforce in the years ahead, CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a staff memo last month. Also in June, Microsoft announced it will lay off about 9,000 workers, roughly 4 percent of its payroll.
The increasing drumbeat of similar news has office workers wondering if their jobs are the low-hanging fruit that AI will pick next.
If AI automates routine tasks, it will eliminate the kind of work done by entry-level workers hired straight out of college, some have argued. Deploying AI at that level can be done now, because bots have the skills to handle that level of routine, repetitive work.
Within five years, AI will be able to wipe away half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, Anthropic cofounder Dario Amodei said in a recent Axios interview.
However, giving those jobs to AI gives young workers no entrée into a business, cutting off the flow of workers gaining know-how and ready to move up in the corporate ranks…
OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap took a different view in a New York Times interview last month. He believes AI poses the greatest threat to senior executives who have been doing things the same way for most of their careers and are resistant to disruptive change.
If low-level jobs are at greatest risk, is a four-year college education relevant or necessary?, the WSJ asked.
Experience shows that in computer-related businesses, low-level workers with less than two years of time with a company are most likely to be dumped. The number of entry-level workers at such companies peaked in 2023, according to payroll service ADP, and has dropped around 25 percent since then.
A similar loss was seen among customer service workers at phone banks, the newspaper said.
A 2023 study from the University of California at Irvine compared the productivity of Italian coders, to whom AI had been forbidden, with that of their counterparts in France and Spain, where AI had been put to work.
It found low-level workers used AI to do more work faster, while more senior people in the department used the AI more broadly—for example, to check the work of human coders or to work on projects whose language of which they didn’t understand.
“When people are really good at things, they end up helping other people instead of working on their own projects,” a tendency AI emphasized, Sarah Bana, a study coauthor, told the WSJ.
That indicates that AI would be more likely to cut entry-level jobs while multiplying mid-level roles because AI allows those more senior people to add more value to an organization, the study concluded.
On the flip side, a well-trained AI could take the place of well-trained, higher-level workers such as an engineer who writes code or a lawyer who writes routine legal briefs, MIT economist Danielle Li wrote in a recent paper.
A boutique law firm focused on intellectual property has the same number of paralegals formatting court documents as it has in the past, attorney Robert Plotkin told the NYT. However, the firm now has fewer lawyers.
Attorneys at the firm draft patent applications for clients, a job that can be done more efficiently with AI, Plotkin said. “I’ve become very efficient at using AI to help me draft applications in a way that’s reduced our need for contract lawyers,” he added.
Last spring, Microsoft laid off 6,000 workers, many of whom were software developers. This month’s layoffs included a swath of middle managers.
“Anything that is administrative, spreadsheet-related, a document management-type activity, AI should be able to perform fairly easily, freeing time for managers to do more mentoring,” David Furlonger, a vice-president at research firm Gartner said to the WSJ.
“How you decrease cost isn’t by firing the cheapest employees you have,” Harper Read, CEO of 2389 Research, a bot-building company, told the WSJ. “You take the cheapest employee and [use AI to] make them worth the expensive employee.”
That implies an evolving new corporate structure in which worker bees use AI to accomplish a range of tasks across various levels of complexity, with almost no middle managers, leaving a tier of senior executives to manage and mentor the lower-level employees.
That’s how 2389 Research is structured, Reed noted.
TRENDPOST:
So the answer to the question, “exactly which jobs will AI take first?” is lower, middle, and high-level jobs. No tier of workers is safe.
That returns the discussion to a question we raised early in the AI revolution and that Gartner’s Furlonger asked in his WSJ interview: “What are all those people going to do? How will they be funded? What is the impact on tax revenue?”
Proposals have included a vast expansion of programs offering a guaranteed income, raising the funds for them by placing an “income tax” on AIs according to the value of the work they do.
While think tanks and advocacy groups have begun to delve into the issues around workers turfed out by AI, government policymakers have not. Those discussions and trial programs must begin now to meet the needs of the rising number of workers that AI will dispense with, and college grads who will not be able to find jobs, in the near-term future.