More and more companies are directly citing artificial intelligence when they announce job cuts (OLIVIER MORIN) · OLIVIER MORIN/AFP/AFP
AI industry insiders want workers to code smarter, think harder and lean into their humanity — but still dodge the question of how many jobs artificial intelligence will destroy.
The reassurance rang out across HumanX, a four-day conference drawing some 6,500 investors, entrepreneurs and tech executives, even as a blunt advertisement at the entrance set the tone: “Stop hiring humans.”
On the main stage, May Habib, chief executive of an AI platform called Writer, told the audience that Fortune 500 bosses are having a “collective panic attack” on the subject.
The anxiety is well-founded. More and more companies are directly citing AI in announcing job cuts.
High-profile examples are on the rise: Salesforce laid off 4,000 customer support workers, saying AI now handles 50 percent of its work.
Block chief Jack Dorsey announced plans to cut the company’s headcount nearly in half, citing “intelligence tools” that have fundamentally changed how companies operate.
Not all claims have gone uncontested — some economists say firms are pointing to AI to rationalize layoffs that are really about past overhiring or cost-cutting ahead of massive infrastructure investments.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman has spoken of “AI-washing,” and most speakers at the San Francisco event similarly dismissed the invocation of AI as a false pretext for job cuts — even as they freely predicted disruption was just around the corner.
AI is going to “transform every single company, every single job, every single way that we do work,” said Matt Garman, chief executive of cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services.
– ‘Pretty unsettling’ –
The debate remains heated. Two years ago, Nvidia chief Jensen Huang declared that the ultimate goal was to make it so “nobody has to program” or code.
“We will look back on that as some of the worst career advice ever given,” Andrew Ng, founder of training platform DeepLearning.AI, shot back on Tuesday.
In his view, coding is not an obsolete skill — AI has simply made it available to more people.
Another argument has taken hold in Silicon Valley: interpersonal skills will become more valuable than ever, with some voices going so far as to tout a humanities education as sound tech career preparation.
“As AI can do more of a job, the things that will distinguish and differentiate a given employee are going to be the human skills — critical thinking, communication, teamwork,” said Greg Hart, chief executive of training platform Coursera, which has seen enrollment in its critical thinking courses triple over the past year.