OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicts entire job categories will be ‘totally, totally gone’
One of the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence bosses made a bold suggestion about the future of one industry.
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Entire job industries could be “totally, totally gone” as the world moves toward an artificial intelligence-dominated future, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has said.
In an interview at the Capital Framework for Large Banks conference at the Federal Reserve in Washington DC, Mr Altman – whose company is worth an estimated $US300 billion ($457b) – acknowledged that “no one knows what happens next”, but suggested certain professions would be rendered moot as we become more reliant on the technology.
“There’s a lot of these really smart-sounding predictions,” he said.
“‘Oh, this is going to happen on this and the economy over here’ – no one knows that. In my opinion, this is too complex of a system, this is too new and impactful of a technology, it’s very hard to predict.”
Still, he said, “some areas … I think (will be) just like totally, totally gone”, singling out customer support roles as a job that had already been transformed by AI.
“That’s a category where I just say, you know what, when you call customer support, you’re on target and AI, and that’s fine … Now you call one of those things and AI answers,” Mr Altman said.
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“It’s like a super-smart, capable person. There’s no phone tree, there’s no transfers.
“It can do everything that any customer support agent at that company could do. It does not make mistakes. It’s very quick. You call once, the thing just happens. It’s done.”
AI’s diagnostic capabilities had already surpassed human doctors, Mr Altman added.
“ChatGPT today, by the way, most of the time, can give you better – it’s like, a better diagnostician than most doctors in the world,” he said.
“Yet people still go to doctors, and I am not, like – maybe I’m a dinosaur here, but I really do not want to … entrust my medical fate to ChatGPT with no human doctor in the loop.”
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‘Going to get better at what everyone does’
Altman’s remarks follow his counterpart at artificial intelligence lab Anthropic Dario Amodei’s warning that the technology could eliminate half of all entry-level, white-collar jobs within the next five years.
In a May interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, the 42-year-old said that politicians and businesses are not prepared for the spike in unemployment rates AI could prompt.
“AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks, and we’re going to collectively, as a society, grapple with it,” Mr Amodei said.
“AI is going to get better at what everyone does, including what I do, including what other CEOs do.”
The technology that companies like his are building, Mr Amodei said, could boost unemployment in America as high as 20 per cent by 2030.
Anthropic’s AI can work nearly seven hours a day, he said, and has the skills typically required of entry-level corporate workers – “the ability to summarise a document, analyse a bunch of sources and put it into a report, write computer code” to the same standard “as a smart college student”.
“We can see where the trend is going, and that’s what’s driving some of the concern (about AI in the workforce),” Mr Amodei said.
Public not ‘fully aware of what’s going on’
Though Mr Amodei acknowledged it would “definitely not (be) in my economic interest” to do so, he urged US politicians to consider implementing a tax on AI labs.
He said he was “raising the alarm” because chief executives at companies like his “haven’t as much and I think someone needs to say it and be clear”.
“It’s eerie the extent to which the broader public and politicians, legislators, I don’t think, are fully aware of what’s going on,” Mr Amodei said.
In a separate interview with US publication Axios, Mr Amodei said such workforce changes are “going to happen in a small amount of time – as little as a couple of years or less”.
“Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10 per cent a year, the budget is balanced – and 20 per cent of people don’t have jobs,” he said.
“Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen. It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it.”
In January, a World Economic Forum (WEF) survey found that 41 per cent of employers intend to reduce their workforce because of AI automation by 2030.
“Advances in AI and renewable energy are reshaping the (labour) market – driving an increase in demand for many technology or specialist roles while driving a decline for others, such as graphic designers,” the WEI said in a statement at the time.
“The presence of both graphic designers and legal secretaries just outside the top 10 of fastest-declining job roles, a first-time job prediction not seen in previous editions of the Future of Jobs Report, may illustrate GenAI’s increasing capacity to perform knowledge work.”
Closer to home, the Social Policy Group in December reported that without immediate intervention, one in three Australians in knowledge-based or manual roles were at risk of job loss by the end of this decade.
Conversely, the WEF found that close to 70 per cent of companies plan to hire new workers with skills to design AI tools and enhancements, and 62 per cent plan to hire more employees with skills to work alongside the technology.
“Now, you can hire one experienced worker, equip them with AI tooling, and they can produce the output of the junior worker on top of their own – without the overhead,” recruiter at US venture capital firm SignalFire, Heather Doshay, told Business Insider.
Ms Doshay stressed that AI “isn’t stealing job categories outright – it’s absorbing the lowest-skill tasks”.
“That shifts the burden to universities, boot camps, and candidates to level up faster,” she added.
‘We can’t just sleepwalk into it’
Mr Amodei insisted AI can – and will – be used for good, noting he “wouldn’t be building this technology if I didn’t think that it could make the world better”.
“(But) we have to make sure that people have the ability to adapt, and that we adopt the right policies,” Mr Amodei told CNN.
“We have to act now. We can’t just sleepwalk into it … I don’t think we can stop this bus.
“From the position that I’m in, I can maybe hope to do a little to steer the technology in a direction where we become aware of the harms, we address the harms, and we’re still able to achieve the benefits.”
Originally published as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicts entire job categories will be ‘totally, totally gone’
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