✨How many jobs have already been replaced by AI or how many will be in the future?

👉🏾In June 2021, OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, tweeted a prediction that "AI will cause the price of work that can happen in front of a computer to decrease much faster than the price of work that happens in the physical world. This is the opposite of what most people (including me) expected, and will have strange effects."

👉🏾 In January 2023, "just days after Microsoft announced plans to lay off 10,000 employees as part of broader cost-cutting measures, the company also confirmed it was making a “multibillion-dollar” investment into OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

👉🏾In March 2023," in the same letter to its staff Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to lay off another 10,000 workers (after cutting 11,000 positions last November), the Meta CEO also outlined plans for investing heavily in AI".

👉🏾The same month, "Goldman Sachs predicted that 300 million jobs will be lost or degraded by AI."

👉🏾In April 2023, "Dropbox also said it was laying off 16% of its workforce — 500 employees — citing AI as the cause. The company claimed it now needed “a different mix of skill sets, particularly in AI and early-stage product development,” according to a blog post."

👉🏾In May 2033, "IBM expected to pause hiring for roles as roughly 7,800 jobs could be replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the coming years"

👉🏾 The same month, "Artificial intelligence contributed to nearly 4,000 job losses according to data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. [...] making AI the seventh-highest contributor to employment losses in May cited by employers."

👉🏾In July 2023, "Shopify employee alleged that the CEO, Tobias Lütke had been discreetly dismissing the global customer service team across multiple countries, intending to replace them with AI chatbots"

👉🏾This month of September, a French company, called Onclusive, said that it will lay off more than 2/3 of its employees between January and June 2024 due to AI, either 217 employees out of 387 in total.

The world is not fair and we have to focus and put our energy towards what we can control.

👉🏾To employees (and future ones): it is time to develop your AI literacy and gain experience in that domain.

👉🏾To employers: as much as DEI, Sustainability, Ethical/Human Rights, and Economic/Financial Responsibilities have been part of your Corporate Social Responsibility strategies, it might be time to consider UBI "Universal Basic Income" as one of the answers to job loss due to AI. UBI has already been experimented with in the US and globally. UBI was shared by Andrew Yang in his Yang2020 campaign for the presidential elections and is currently part of the Worldcoin AI/crypto project developed by Sam Altman.

#ai #joblosses #notamyth #ailiteracy #csr #ubi #thefutureisnow

Christelle Mombo-Zigah (wife, mother, black woman in tech, AI enthusiast, published author, lifelong learner, immigrant with an accent, invested in "inspiring the next generations of leaders, and giving a voice to the voiceless").