Meta Platforms Inc. META CEO Mark Zuckerberg has tried to answer one of the biggest questions on everyone's minds: will AI take away jobs?
What Happened: One of the biggest concerns sparked by the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in every facet of our lives is its potential impact on the livelihoods of white-collar employees.
While the question might be difficult to tackle, Zuckerberg is one of the better people out there to answer it given Meta is amongst the leading companies working on creating the next generation of AI technologies. Its latest large language mode, Llama 2, is open source and free to use.
So, if you are an average white-collar employee, like a customer service representative or an accountant, is your job under threat and should you pivot to an AI-aided field?
Zuckerberg says he's not sure if it's time to make the pivot yet, but he is also optimistic that AI will positively impact people's lives.
"Over the long term, I'm actually quite bullish that all these tools will give more people the potential to kind of do what they care about."
This could be anything from doing what you love apart from your day job, to just spending more time with family and friends. Perhaps Zuckerberg was thinking about raising cattle with macadamia nuts and beer for wagyu beef on his $100 million Hawaii ranch.
Zuckerberg also talked about how he thinks not everyone is doing the job that they love, and so, AI will help augment the capacity for people to do what they love. But we still have a long way to get there, so what happens in the near future?
"I think there will be a bunch of transformation that will mean that certain jobs we don't do them in the way we're doing them now. Certain things might get automated."
Zuckerberg also thinks we are not using "human ingenuity" optimally just yet, so there is still a lot of scope for progressing on that front.
Why It Matters: AI's rapid rise has caused an increasing insecurity about jobs. One of the pioneers in the AI industry, OpenAI's Sam Altman, has already announced his thoughts on cushioning people from the impact of AI on their jobs with his universal basic income (UBI) proposal.
Altman said AI could create enough wealth within a decade to distribute $13,500 every year to 250 million adults in the U.S.
"That dividend could be much higher if AI accelerates growth, but even if it's not, $13,500 will have much greater purchasing power than it does now because technology will have greatly reduced the cost of goods and services."
The World Economic Forum's (WEF) "The Future of Jobs Report 2020" has predicted that AI could replace 85 million jobs by 2025, and we're only a year away from that predicted timeline.
But it's not all gloom and doom – AI is expected to create 97 million jobs as well. What could change, though, is what those jobs actually are. Perhaps a pivot could solve that, but what the right time for that pivot is, that is not clear yet.
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