In February of this year, an artificial intelligence (AI) summit with technology developers in attendance was held in Paris, France. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet whose AI is called Gemini, spoke there and described AI as being “the most profound shift of our lifetimes.” Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, predicted AI would cause the “largest change to the global labour market in human history.” Sam Altman of OpenAI and ChatGPT stated, “In a decade perhaps everyone on Earth will be capable of accomplishing more than the most impactful person can today.”
The word “democratization” comes up anytime you talk to AI technology buffs. Those who speak of democratization, describe a levelling of the job market where the expertise needed gets replaced by an AI companion. In the words of Jenssen Huang, CEO of AI chip maker, Nvidia, democratization makes all workers “CEOs of AI agents.”
I asked Marybeth how AI was being perceived by the management and employees of the companies with which she works. She volunteered to write what follows. Sundar, Dario, Sam, Jenssen and other AI experts need to take notice.
Will you lose your job to AI? Employees are increasingly concerned about the potential impact AI will have on their employment.
How can organizational leaders expect to maintain employee motivation and productivity if much of their workforce is unnerved by the potential threat AI represents to their job security?
AI is causing stress. Stress is based on a perceived threat, even though the object of concern may not be an actual threat. What we know about employees’ AI anxiety is that most of it is based on the unknown. Fear of the unknown in the present and future regarding how AI will infiltrate their workplace fuels negative speculation and uncertainty, which leads to worry.
Research informs us that at least 85% of what we worry about never materializes. That is seldom comforting for workers caught in fearful rumination loops about the repercussions of being replaced by technology or being unable to adapt to technology-related changes despite years of loyal high performance at their job.
Employees want transparency. If companies make clear to their workforce how incorporating AI into the business aligns with its purpose and goals by augmenting and assisting their work rather than replacing them, perhaps some of this internal tension around its introduction can be soothed. Clear and honest communication helps ensure the well-being of the individual employee by lowering stress and boosting organizational morale, which is especially important in rapidly changing environments.
Clear communication about how AI can be harnessed to assist employees with mundane work to enable more time for creative engagement helps shift the workforce from anxiety and resistance towards acceptance and engagement. To do this effectively, leaders need to collaborate with employees to co-create AI solutions for their specific organizational context. Here is what research tells us:
Deliberately including them in the conversation is key to an effective transitioning of some job tasks to AI. Aspects of the job that require ethical reasoning, human connections, and other tasks which AI cannot execute, would remain in the employee’s portfolio and guard against being declared redundant. That’s why employees included in the decision-making process promote buy-in for eventual decisions and implementations and help mitigate feelings of loss of control which play a significant role in occupational stress.
So far in implementing AI these facts stand out across the globe:
One can only conclude that a greater investment in AI education and training is needed. This instructional gap fosters misunderstanding. It impacts how AI is perceived. It limits AI’s potential to provide maximum benefits for the organization and employees. Training improves individual capacity and confidence and cultivates a culture where employees feel empowered.
To maximize the return on investment (ROI) in AI, training needs to be industry-specific and must begin well before the AI is implemented. Workers need to know in advance about the role of AI in their jobs. They need to receive assurance that sufficient AI training will be provided alongside AI strategies once implemented.
With the explosive expansion of AI across a wide range of industries, the rush to implement AI to remain competitive should not come at the expense of strategic integration in ways that support a company’s key priorities. It should adequately guide employees to meet AI challenges successfully.
Employee stress and anxiety about AI are on the rise. Recent surveys show:
What can an employee do to navigate these complex and evolving AI feelings or concerns?
Today businesses are rethinking their operations in light of COVID-19. The pandemic and countrywide lockdowns have forced employees to work from home. Among the companies affected are the giants of Silicon Valley.
This week Facebook and Google told their employees they need not return to their offices for the rest of the year. Twitter announced that employees could work from home permanently.
For employees who moved to the very expensive Valley area in cities like Cupertino, Los Altos, Mountain View, Palo Alto, San Jose, and Santa Clara, the idea that proximity to the central campus was no longer a requirement has profound implications. If working from home becomes permanent will many consider leaving the Valley to work in places where the cost of living is lower, and where connectivity is not compromised?
One of the attractions of working on the large campuses of Silicon Valley is being immersed in a corporate culture. These companies have fostered work environments that encourage employees to stick around well beyond the end of the workday because of amenities and other perks. But moving to a remote working model will change all that. Who will benefit? Possibly many small towns and remote rural areas of the United States and elsewhere where housing affordability and cost-of-living proves to be an attractor.
For managers who oversee the work being done by employees every day, the change is likely to be more difficult. Managers will have to come up with new ways to measure productivity. Companies will have to look at compensation differently. Silicon Valley required large salaries just to be able to pay for housing. An employee, however, who chooses to live in Upper Michigan may not need the same level of compensation. The cost savings in salary and benefits alone will give companies reason to consider the move to remote work a significant benefit to the bottom line.
In the end, as Silicon Valley employees relocate to remote locales they may plant the seeds for new entrepreneurial high technology pursuits with startups sprouting all around the world. And then there is the environmental benefit. Less commuting means less pollution.
The biggest challenges no doubt will be behavioural. Every company with a sales organization already has remote-working road warriors. I was one of them. But for many people in a business, working from home will require a significant adjustment. Centralized offices provide structured environments where meetings are regularly scheduled, and where gatherings at the water cooler or in the lunchroom are part of the ambiance. There is no accounting for what may happen when an employee becomes self-directed and no longer within face-to-face talking distance of others in a team, or with management. And for managers who will have to embrace a very different way of providing direction, the change will be disorienting.
Twenty-five years ago I used to work with clients across the globe. My travel took me to face-to-face meetings in five different technology hubs in North America: Ottawa, Kitchener-Waterloo, Richardson, Research Triangle Park, and San Jose. With cloud computing and high-speed connectivity, I could have met virtually and saved the planet’s atmosphere tons of greenhouse gas emissions. Would I have been as effective in my consultations? I don’t know but I’m certain I would have adapted to this new paradigm just as I believe those working in high technology fields can today while never leaving their home office.
Will the business world adjust to virtual one-on-one and one-to-many relationships online? Already, Facebook, Google, and Twitter are moving in that direction. I won’t be surprised if many other businesses follow that same path, and it took a virus, not fighting to mitigate climate change, to make this happen. Who would have thought?
In Canada, the unemployment rate is nearing a historic low at 5.8% with more than 283,000 job openings available. Unlike the U.S., there are more job seekers than jobs available in my country which may make some of Peter’s observations somewhat parochial. Nonetheless, this is pretty interesting observation about the future of technological unemployment. As always your comments are welcomed.
Workers have been on a fast track to obsolescence since the Luddites first took sledgehammers to industrial looms in the United Kingdom in the early 1800s.
In the United States in 1790, 90% of all Americans made a living as farmers. Today that number is less than 2%.
Did the jobs disappear? No. What happened was the U.S. agrarian economy first altered to become an industrial and manufacturing economy, then it morphed into a service economy, and today has become an information economy.
The automation that came with these changes didn’t obliterate jobs, it just substituted new jobs for old. In many cases, automation and older jobs ended up working side-by-side. Consider automated teller machines (ATMs) as an example. When first rolled out in the 1970s, there were serious concerns about bank teller layoffs. Between 1995 and 2010, in the U.S., the number of ATMs grew from 100,000 to 400,000, but mass teller unemployment did not follow. Because ATMs made bank operations cheaper, banks expanded growing locations by 40%. More banks meant more jobs for human bank tellers causing employment to rise for this type of work.
The same thing happened in textile manufacturing. Even though 98% of material-making today is automated, the number of weaving jobs has increased since the 1800s. The lowering of the cost for fabric because of automation made clothes cheaper, increasing sales, and, as a result, increasing jobs for textile workers.
This pattern even applies to paralegals and law clerks, two professions predicted to suffer job loss as a result of artificial intelligence (AI). Discovery software, introduced into law firms in the 1990s, was supposed to lessen lawyers’ needs for clerks and paralegals. Instead, the inverse happened. It turns out that the AI was so good at discovery, lawyers needed more paralegal staff to sift through the deluge of results.
Productivity gains are the main reason companies automate. Yet time and again, large increases in productivity don’t result in the replacement of humans with machines, but rather the augmentation of the machines with additional human help. It’s all about collaboration.
In one example, BMW saw an 85% increase in productivity when it replaced traditional, automated assembly line processes with a combination of humans and robots working in teams.
It should be pointed out that every time a technology goes exponential, we find an Internet-sized opportunity tucked inside. Taking advantage of these opportunities requires adaptation, which demands workforce retraining, yet the end result is a net gain in jobs.
Looking at the Internet itself, according to research by McKinsey in thirteen countries stretching from China and Russia to the U.S., it created 2.6 new jobs for every one eliminated. In each of these aforementioned countries, the Internet’s rise contributed 10% to GDP growth, and that number continues to grow.
Make no mistake, certain jobs are heading for extinction. While experts predict technological unemployment will have a greater impact in the 2030s, this next decade could see whole categories of professional work disappear. Robots are encroaching upon the territory of everyone from truckers and taxi drivers to warehouse workers and retail employees. Amazon Go might not spell the end of all cashiers, but in grocery stores, convenience stores, and gas stations, people will be absent more than present. The real question is: will there be enough time to retrain our workforces before the effects take hold?
The answer appears to be yes. Goldman Sachs, for instance, recently made headlines with a study projecting that autonomous vehicles will take 300,000 driving jobs a year, but that the transition will take 25 years before completion.
Amazon has announced plans to invest $700 million over the next 6 years in retraining a third of its U.S. workforce to adapt to economic disruptions caused by automation and technology.
Equally important in the transition, advances in VR-accelerated learning and AI-directed learning curricula will make retraining easier, quicker, and more effective. And as AI becomes a more user-friendly interface embedded in our computing technology, we will see a shift in the skills required for retraining. For a host of jobs, technological fluency and agility will replace deep skills mastery.
The future of technological employment and unemployment come down to the key challenge of human-machine collaboration. Humans have long demonstrated a remarkable ability to incorporate technology into new opportunities for growth. With convergence accelerating AI’s transition from a cognitive prosthetic to a smart collaborator, the future of work will be a partnership between ourselves and the technology we have created. The recent labor shortages in the U.S., with 6 million job seekers for 7.4 million jobs, can be addressed through a partnership between us and the tools that augment us. That is the yet to be fulfilled challenge of the 2020s.
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When I’m shopping at Whole Foods or CVS, my goal is to get in and out of the store as soon as possible. Find what I need, pay for it and leave. As such, I imagine a near-term future in which an AI agent will guide me rapidly to the exact aisle and shelf to help me find the product. Then, as I leave the store, the system will charge me automatically. No need to stop, stand in line and pull out my wallet.
Taking it one step further, imagine a future where I never go to the store in the first place. My refrigerator can sense that I’m low on milk or eggs, order it all from the store, and have those products delivered by autonomous vehicle or drone. In this near-term scenario, all I do is take the products off my front doorstep and stock them in my refrigerator.
High-level autonomy is already underway. Over the last few months, up in Seattle, Amazon has established a store called Amazon Go, which is a cashierless retail store for Amazon employees only. The reason it’s only for Amazon employees is that they’re doing tests to see how it works. Currently, Amazon employees access an app, enter the store, and then simply take what they want off the shelf.
That’s it. A system of cameras and sensors can observe what you’re taking and how many, and Amazon charges the correct amount to your account. All you do is walk out, no checkout and no cashiers. The technology isn’t perfect yet, which is why Amazon is doing this as a test. But it will get better and will ultimately become how stores transact purchases.
Will some retail stores only employ humans? Skip the automation? It’s possible, but I doubt it.
Imagine comparing two stores: one that embraces the technology and another that does not. The store that’s fully autonomous enables you to walk in, get your products, and leave twice as fast. And, by the way, the products are cheaper because the business doesn’t have employee overheads. How will this compare to a retailer that offers slower and more expensive services? The store employing humans will be slower to respond to customers, more expensive, and will ultimately go out of business. The end result, the jobs will disappear.
For those who are cashiers, when will this happen? I would imagine it’s not in the next couple years, but likely within five, and definitely within the next decade.
Knowing that, how do you prepare yourself? Here’s my question: what did you want to do when you were younger? Did you always want to be a cashier, or did you want to be a nurse, teacher, or to travel the world? Ultimately, going back to your early passions and taking on the education needed to achieve them is what’s needed. Take caution, though, as even those jobs may become displaced by AI and robots eventually.
We’re heading into a period where technological employment will cause us to struggle with how we find meaning in our lives, and with how we earn our living. Important experiments are going on today with Universal Basic Income (UBI), a program to pay everyone a salary, whether working or not. UBI will ensure we have food on the table, medical care, and so on, but it’s not going to give meaning to our life. This is something we need to think about and solve, not in 20 years or 10, but in the next five.
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