The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, was dominated by one topic this year: AI.
From medical device makers to bankers to tech executives, artificial intelligence was the hot topic among the global elite gathered in the Swiss Alps.
And while the promise of robots and AI’s future was certainly top of mind, the biggest discussions revolved around the technology’s potential impact on the broader labor market.
BlackRock (BLK) CEO and interim co-chair of the World Economic Forum, Larry Fink, referenced the danger of job losses caused by AI during his discussion with Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang, while JPMorgan (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon said plans need to be put in place for potential government intervention to prevent companies from enacting mass AI-driven layoffs.
Dimon predicted there would be civil unrest if, for instance, self-driving trucks replaced an estimated 2 million US truckers at the press of a button, leaving them with far lower salaries than they’re used to.
“How do you have plans in place to make it work better if in fact [AI] does something terrible … and that’s the only way to do it,” he said.
Read more: Are we in an AI bubble? How to protect your portfolio if your AI investments turn against you.
Concerns that AI will lead to large-scale layoffs across various economic sectors have been bubbling for years. But as generative AI continues to advance, leading to multimodal language models and agentic AI, the alarm bells are getting louder.
Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) CEO Dario Amodei said during a conversation at Davos that the tech industry is “six to 12 months” away from an AI model that can perform most, if not all, of the job functions of a software engineer.
During the same chat, Google (GOOG, GOOGL) DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis predicted that we’ll begin to see AI impacting internships as well as entry-level and junior-level jobs this year.
Fink raised similar concerns about AI supplanting humans in analyst positions at legal and financial institutions.
Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, provided a dire view of the impact of AI on the job market saying that, “On average 40% of jobs are touched by AI, either enhanced or scrapped, or changed quite significantly without implications for better pay.”
Georgieva described AI expansion as a “tsunami” hitting the labor market.
“Even in the best prepared countries, I don’t think we are prepared enough,” she added.
While job losses were a major topic during the weeklong forum, there was also a good deal of pontification about how AI will help jobs.
