Almost a year has passed since the rise of AI Last spring, remembering another heyday: the “tulip mania” of the Dutch Golden Age, one of the most infamous examples of a financial bubble in economic history. But will ChatGPT blossom with consequences for every worker’s work, or will it wither like the petals fall from the proverbial plant?
Even if people disagree on whether AI will take away your job or improve it, one thing is clear: Managers are starting to pit these innovations against disenfranchised workers.
Look no further than IBM, whose shares are up nearly 17% year to date, a boon attributed in part to the company’s adoption of artificial intelligence. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna has openly stated that many jobs at IBM could be partially or completely replaced by AI, even writing in an April op-ed for the magazine Luck that it used AI to reduce the number of employees doing relatively manual HR work to about 50 from 700 previously, allowing the company to focus on other things.
But Krishna is a bit ambiguous on this topic: He has gone from saying that certain roles will be replaced by AI to saying that AI will create more jobs than it eliminates. This is all to say how decision makers will ultimately welcome and adopt AI is still to be determined.
However, executives are considering following IBM’s lead, with a whopping 41% of managers saying they hope to replace workers with cheaper artificial intelligence products this year, a major study shows. survey of 3,000 managers from the software company beautiful.ai.
The report comes amid a wave of anger and instability among workers. According to a survey conducted BambooHR. Struggling to make ends meet, many Americans have become disillusioned with the workforce and have reported a loss of faith in nearly every profession lately. Gallup Poll on Integrity and Ethics.
Recent wage growth outpaced inflation, although after years of volatility, it makes sense that many households don’t feel like the data will necessarily hit their wallets. Although the popularity of unions has recently increased (amid UAW success stories and studies of the union’s financial impact), membership is still low. record low after decades of decline. The struggle for higher wages and decent wages is evident in the “hot summer of work” as strike activity has increased by 280% in the last year alone.
But it seems that some managers’ heads rear up when it comes to whether to give them a pay raise or hire a robot. In a new survey, nearly half of managers (48%) said their companies would benefit from replacing some work tools with tools. And 45% said they see these innovations as a chance to “lower employee salaries because less human work is required.”
Are managers interested in science fiction or watching the development of artificial intelligence?
Of course, when artificial intelligence first began its growth spurt in 2023, there was a wave of paranoia. Rapid improvement and evolution have caused many to move, as 61% of Americans believed new products could threaten civilization, according to Reuters/Ipsos. survey.
As the knee-jerk reaction to AI died down over the course of the year, new theories emerged about the trajectory of AI. “No, it will not replace you, but a person who can use AI better than you,” has become a popular opinion. Some have suggested that you are at risk of losing your job depending on your sectorseniority level or place of work. And junior workers, by nature vulnerable, reported the greatest fear of losing their jobs due to AI. Many employees are eager to learn more about the beast they fear (that’s the devil, or generative artificial intelligence, you know), as 79% said they would like to receive training in this area from consulting firm Oliver Wyman.
Take, for example, Noah Smith, an influential economics writer who left his position at Bloomberg Opinion to launch his own Substack, and Niall Ferguson, a Scottish economic historian who has held posts at Stanford and Harvard (as well as Bloomberg Opinion). They recently gave their take on the doom and accelerationism debate.
“It’s entirely possible that in an AI-dominated era, regular people will have many high-paying jobs, often doing much the same work they do now,” Smith wrote on his Substack, which sparked agreement and debate between a number of leading economists who was talking to The newspaper “New York Times’ Peter Coy. Ferguson “…recent evidence of labor market shocks caused by automation and international trade suggests that the negative impacts of AI will be geographically and demographically concentrated, and labor markets in the hardest-hit places will not be able to adjust smoothly.”
Despite this, after investors poured billions into artificial intelligence, prompting comparisons to the stock market of the mid-to-late 90s, Rana Foroohar of Financial Times caveats that we may be getting ahead of ourselves. Warning against the “inevitability” that AI will change the world, upend our jobs or increase productivity, she warns that we are still in the early stages of innovation and it will take decades for this to play out – and of course a bubble could will burst soon.
We are in new territory, or on shaky ground if the experts’ mixed predictions are to be accepted. All this means is that managers likely don’t have the AI leverage they think they have to quell a potential worker uprising (if that’s what they want). And even if they did, managers might be better off worrying about their own roles. Those at the top may be more susceptible to AI intrusion, although by the nature of management decision-making they are likely protected from true vulnerability. And 48% of managers said artificial intelligence tools pose a threat to their salaries and will lead to lower wages for all staff this year. Even more (50%) said they feared their leadership position could see an AI-related pay cut.
But most managers aren’t really looking to have a fully robotic workforce. Rather, 66% of managers are looking to use artificial intelligence tools to improve the productivity of their employees. Only 12% of executives said they use AI to reduce headcount or reduce costs. So managers could be bluffing or simply weighing their options right now.
“AI may not replace managers, but managers who use AI will replace managers who don’t,” IBM chief commercial officer Rob Thomas said at the conference. TechCrunch. “It really changes the way people work.”