Gluttonous AI worms its way into your job

Artificial intelligence (AI) is notorious for the massive amounts of money, data, energy it requires to deliver - not always reliable - results. But it is becoming increasingly clear AI wants to put another thing on the menu: the jobs of lots of workers.

The decades-old promise of digitisation is that it can save you significant costs. Both costs in customer and employee time, but also literally costs in the financial sense. Now those cost savings are quite disappointing, and the productivity gains have also been barely visible for years. This insight makes organisations very nervous.

AI as a new productivity promise

As you can imagine, the promise of artificial intelligence (AI) is very attractive to commercial organisations in particular: an increase in productivity with a reduction in costs. Indeed, at the bottom line, this leaves more profit. Shareholders love that!

So it is not surprising that investors financially support one AI startup after another and that AI tech companies continue to raise money to keep feeding their energy- and data-guzzling AI technology. All without making a single penny of profit. Because suppose they deliver on the AI promise: guaranteed increases in productivity and profits!

The hunt for profit

Now you may wonder if there is really that much more profit to be made if every organisation has the same AI approach. In any case, one organisation will not do significantly better than another. So it is more FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) - the fear of missing the boat - why organisations are getting so fanatically involved with AI.

This also largely ignores the non-vanishing disadvantages of hallucination, the aforementioned high energy consumption and the dormant biases in the algorithms, among others. The probability of winning is just too high. It almost sounds like a gambling addict in a casino.

The cost of increased profits

Organisations are already sorting for the AI promise and laying off whole batteries of freelancers and employees. And even more often, they are no longer hiring new people in certain industries and professions because the idea is that AI will take over those jobs. That backfired very badly for the likes of Klarna and Duolingo, but that doesn't stop other organisations from already stripping away jobs.

The effects of this approach can already be seen worldwide. The Times talks about the phenomenon that the number of jobs for startups has dropped by a third. Particularly in the Retail, IT, accounting and finance sectors.

Just last week I spoke to a freelance editor who had worked for years for a well-known Dutch department store where most of the editors had been laid off because AI had taken over the work. Similarly, the marketer of an international beauty and cosmetics company confided in me that all marketing content is now written solely by AI.

What remains?

And - moving forward, it's not the most reliable source because he contradicts himself so often - Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic (of chatbot Claude) warned just last month that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, increasing unemployment by 10 to 20 percent.

The United States is also experiencing a slowdown in job creation. Economists expect job growth slowed to 115,000 in June and the unemployment rate rose to 4.3%. The tariff war will be partly to blame for this, but AI probably plays a role here as well.

Who is going to manage this?

These sharp declines in the labor market are very reminiscent of the impact of COVID-19 on the labor market. Now that pandemic was a temporary phenomenon, but the rollout of AI threatens to be permanent and ever more greedy.

I do not get the impression that governments and organisations have grasped what could be the enormous social consequences of this trend. In a world where polarisation is leading to increasing tensions and where large groups of people feel excluded, the loss of jobs due to AI could punch even more holes in the little trust people have in governments and institutions.

Taking a break ...

This is the last blog before the summer. It has turned out to be a not very uplifting story, but this does not mean that I have no hope for improvement. I will continue to do my best to contribute to the sustainable and responsible use of artificial intelligence. Together, we can get more done than you think.

But now my colleagues and I are taking a break - well “break,” I'm working hard this summer to get my book finished - and we'll get back to you in September.

I wish you a great summer!