Right now, artificial intelligence (AI) is making the world a different place. There are many worries that AI will take away jobs. A lot of big tech companies have already let go of thousands of workers so they can use AI more. Stuart Russell, an expert on AI, says that no one is really safe from being replaced by AI, not even CEOs.
AI can outperform you as a surgeon.
Russell talked about his worries about how AI might change the job market in an episode of the Diary of a CEO show. “AI systems are doing pretty much everything we call work right now,” Stuart Russell said.
The AI expert thought that jobs that are very skilled and usually safe, like doctors’, could be quickly automated, let alone coders. No matter what you want to be, if you want to be a surgeon, it only takes the robot seven seconds to learn how to do it better than any person, he said.
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So far, most cuts have happened to middle-level and low-level workers. However, Stuart Russell said that in the long run, not even leaders will be safe. Says the board, “If you don’t give up your decision-making power to the AI system, we’re going to have to fire you because all of our competitors have AI-powered CEOs and they’re doing much better.” Aww, that poor CEO.
Russell thinks that every country in the world is about to face a big problem because things look so bad. According to him, people are now “staring 80% unemployment in the face.”
It’s not just Stuart Russell who thinks AI will become dangerous for most people at work in the long run. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, told the BBC last month, “I think what a CEO does might be one of the easiest things for an AI to do one day.”
Many other well-known people in technology share and add to these worries. Few people, like Andrew Yang and Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, think that AI will remove or change tens of millions of jobs in the US. Other people, like Jensen Huang of Nvidia and Yann LeCun of Meta, say that AI will change jobs rather than eliminating them. Russell’s warnings, on the other hand, are some of the broadest and point to a future in which few jobs are safe.
In contrast, tech billionaire Elon Musk thinks that in the future of AI, people will not have to work.
