Many experts hold that generative AI will have sweeping effects on the job market. But how exactly it will transform the workforce remains a subject of much debate.
According to Adam Dorr, the director of research at tech forecast nonprofit RethinkX, we're risking putting all of humanity out of a job — and only some oddly specific occupations will survive a major transformation.
"Technology has a new target in its crosshairs — and that's us," Dorr told The Guardian. "That’s our labor."
According to the nonprofit exec, the cost of labor will drop precipitously.
"We’ve seen that pattern before," Dorr told the newspaper. "If I can get the same thing or better for the same or lower cost, switching is a no-brainer. We’re the horses, we’re the film cameras."
It's a foreboding prediction we've heard before. Experts have long warned that AI automation could greatly undermine the value of human labor. Earlier this month, for instance, MIT economist David Autor warned in a podcast interview that AI could lead to a "Mad Max" scenario in which the job market becomes dominated by cheap and commoditized labor, a dystopian alternative to a "super-abundance" long touted by AI boosters.
For his part, Dorr argued that "machines that can think are here, and their capabilities are expanding day by day with no end in sight," adding that "we don’t have that long to get ready for this."
While countless jobs will be on the chopping block, he did flag an oddball assortment that he believes will weather the storm, including "sports coaches, politicians, sex workers, and ethicists."
"There will remain a niche for human labour in some domains," he told The Guardian. "The problem is that there are nowhere near enough of those occupations to employ four billion people."
Dorr isn't the only one arguing that certain professions could be safer than others from an AI revolution.
During a June podcast appearance, "godfather of AI" Geoffrey Hinton predicted that blue-collar jobs like plumbing will remain safe while careers in call centers or as paralegals could be in serious trouble.
The scale of the shift could be enormous. Earlier this month, Ford CEO Jim Farley predicted that AI "is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the US."
Of course, we should take Dodd's — and countless other experts' — predictions with a grain of salt. While executives are frothing at the mouth to start replacing costly human labor with AI, companies are consistently stumbling over roadblocks brought on by the glitchy tech.
And if a critical proportion of jobs are replaced by AI, it starts to raise questions about what the economy would even look like after that.
Some CEOs are undeterred by those pesky questions. Even if "a lot of jobs go away" and their replacements seem "sillier and sillier looking from our current perspective," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman argued last month that "we have always been really good at figuring out new things to do, and ways to occupy ourselves."
Yet plenty of uncertainty remains, and Dorr is quite upfront about that himself.
"I don’t have the answers," he told The Guardian. "We don’t even know if we have the right questions. We need to experiment now and try out new ownership structures, new stakeholder structures."
More on AI jobs: CEOs Say AI Is Poised to Wipe Out an Astonishing Number of Jobs
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