300 Million Jobs Will Be Lost, Degraded By Artificial Intelligence, Report Says

 Artificial intelligence (AI) might be all fun and games now, but the coming effects will be devastating, one top investment bank says.

Goldman Sachs estimates that 300 million jobs could be lost or diminished by the technology as automation renders human workers unnecessary.

“If generative AI delivers on its promised capabilities, the labor market could face significant disruption,” the bank said in a recent report. “Using data on occupational tasks in both the US and Europe, we find that roughly two-thirds of current jobs are exposed to some degree of AI automation, and that generative AI could substitute up to one-fourth of current work.”

“Extrapolating our estimates globally suggests that generative AI could expose the equivalent of 300mn full-time jobs to automation,” the bank said.

Since the report came out, others have chimed in to say artificial intelligence may pose a greater threat to humanity. Last month, Google CEO Eric Schmidt warned that AI bring existential risks, adding that governments will need to step in to ensure technology is not “misused by evil people.”

“Existential risk is defined as many, many, many, many people harmed or killed,” Schmidt said at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit in London, CNBC reported.

“There are scenarios not today, but reasonably soon, where these systems will be able to find zero-day exploits in cyber issues, or discover new kinds of biology. Now, this is fiction today, but its reasoning is likely to be true. And when that happens, we want to be ready to know how to make sure these things are not misused by evil people,” he said.

Meanwhile, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates has warned that AI could take over search engines like Google if, as predicted, the behaviors of users online change dramatically with the advent of the new technology.

 

“Whoever wins the personal agent, that’s the big thing, because you will never go to a search site again, you will never go to a productivity site, you’ll never go to Amazon again,” Gates said during a Goldman Sachs event on AI in San Francisco last month, as quoted by CNBC.

AI assistants, for instance, could “read the stuff you don’t have time to read,” Gates said. That means users could get information without using Google search.

Microsoft moved quickly to get on top of AI, but Gates said there is a 50-50 chance that who comes out on top will be either a startup or a tech giant.

“I’d be disappointed if Microsoft didn’t come in there,” Gates said. “But I’m impressed with a couple of startups, including Inflection,” he added, referring to Inflection.AI, which was co-founded by former DeepMind executive Mustafa Suleyman.

AI is already bringing huge changes in automation. Bill Simmons, the founder of the Spotify-owned podcast network The Ringer, said the streaming platform is currently working on AI tools that will be trained to learn hosts’ voices to create targeted ads.

“I don’t think Spotify is going to get mad at me for this, but we’re developing that stuff,” Simmons said in a conversation with Derek Thompson, an editor at The Atlantic, on an episode of “The Bill Simmons Podcast.” “There is going to be a way to use my voice for the ads. You have to obviously give the approval for the voice, but it opens up, from an advertising standpoint, all these different great possibilities,” he said, according to Business Insider.