AI comes for your work. It is the message that does not stop arriving since Chatgpt reached the market. And even before. The impact of artificial intelligence on the world of employment can be huge, but at the moment its effects have not been noticed. That, they say more and more frequently the CEOs of technological companies, it will change.
First, Shopify. Less than a month ago, the Shopify CEO, Tobi Lütke, sent a memorandum to its employees with a clear directive: “Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation for everyone in Shopify.” In fact, he indicated that before expanding a workforce or investing in other tools, project managers should have exhausted all the ways to do that task with AI already available tools.
Then Fiverr. The last to adopt a decision and speech of this type is Micha Kaufman, CEO of Fiverr, who in a memo to his employees emphasized the importance of protecting their careers in the face of the growing influence of AI. His message was overwhelming:
“This is the unpleasant truth: AI comes for your work. Demons, it also comes for mine. This is a call of attention. It does not matter if you are a programmer, designer, product manager, data scientist, lawyer, customer service representative, seller or financial: the AI comes for you. You must understand that what were previously considered” easy tasks “will no longer exist; what were considered” difficult tasks “will be” difficult tasks ” Easy, and what was considered “impossible tasks” will be the difficult thing.
Finally (for the moment), Duolingo. Luis von Ahn, CEO of Duolingo, announced to its template a few days ago its intention to be “an Ai-first company. AI is already changing how the work is done. It is not a matter of whether or when it will happen. It is happening now. When there is a change of these dimensions, the worst thing you can do is wait.” Among the measures that the company will take is to “gradually stop hiring freelancers to do the work of which AI can be commissioned.” Of course, Von Ahn apostilled, “Duolingo will continue to be a company that deeply cares about its employees. This does not replace the DUOS (company employees) with AI. It is about eliminating bottlenecks so we can do more with the spectacular duos we have now.”
Many said it before, many will say it later. The message is explicit, but of course it is not new. The appearance of Chatgpt caused this type of predictions to become increasingly frequent, and little by little we have seen how the CEOs of large companies have talked about the impact that AI will cause on work. Above all, in the world of programming: Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, was clear a year ago that no one should learn to program, and also said Mark Garman (CEO of AWS) or Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. Mark Zuckerberg joined that prediction a few days ago and said that in 12-18 months the majority of the code would be written by an AI. And I didn’t talk about the machines autocomplete code, but that they would write it completely.
First it will help us, then (perhaps) it will replace us. Many experts believe that AI will enhance our productivity and help us do more and better work than ever. It is what happened with the computer or with the Internet, but with AI there is a clear fear that I end up going beyond and completely doing our work. The possibility is there, although with other technological revolutions, there will be more threatened jobs and others that will be less. Bill Gates, for example, believes that doctors and human teachers do not have much future and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAi, states that the impact of AI on employment “is a huge, huge problem.” Perhaps 140 years of history aim at a surprising future profession.
Hairdressers. Between 1871 and 2011 the technology created more jobs than it destroyed. The 2015 study published in The Guardian focused specifically on data from the Census of England and Wales, and that allowed to assess the impact of technology on the world of employment. The most physical works clearly fell into a fee, but while or other professions were created, or professionals were added to which there were already. For example, surprise: the number of hairdressers grew prodigiously throughout those 140 years: just 0.1% of the workforce in 1871, this group went on to represent 0.6% in 2011.
But the impact is inevitable. There are more studies and forecasts that occurred before the current “revolution” of AI. In 2018 the World Economic Forum (WEF) published its ‘Future of Jobs 2018’ report. In their conclusions they pointed out that automation would eliminate 75 million jobs by 2025, but would create 133 million new functions. The balance has changed five years later. In its 2023 report, this agency pointed out that in the next five years it is estimated that 83 million works will be lost and 69 million will be created. The funny thing is that lately workers seem to be somewhat more optimistic with their future.
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