In his latest book, The Singularity is Nearer (which I am summarizing for you and will publish in chapters… only 70 out of 415 pages left to finish), Ray Kurzweil dedicates an entire chapter to the future of work.
By Pyr Marcondes, Senior Partner at Pipeline Capital.
In the end, he has an optimistic view, believing that while it is true that machines will eliminate a considerable number of jobs, it is also true that Homo sapiens will gain machine-like capabilities, and with that, new horizons of work will emerge.
But one thing is his expectation (which I wholeheartedly support), and another are the shocking projections made by studies and analyses from world-class scientists and consultants.
Below is one of the excerpts where Kurzweil addresses the topic.
“A memorable 2013 study by Oxford University scholars Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne classified about seven hundred occupations by their likelihood of being replaced by the early 2030s.
With a 99% probability of being automated, categories of jobs like telemarketing, insurance brokers, and accountants were at the top. More than half of all occupations had a probability greater than 50% of being automatable.
A 2018 study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reviewed the likelihood of each task within a given job being automated and found results similar to those of Frey and Osborne.
The conclusion was that 14% of jobs in thirty-two countries had more than a 70% chance of being eliminated by automation in the following decade, and another 32% had a probability greater than 50%.
The study’s results suggested that around 210 million jobs were at risk in these countries.
Indeed, a 2021 OECD report confirmed, based on the latest data, that job growth was much slower for jobs at higher risk of automation. And all this research was done before the advances in generative AI, such as ChatGPT and Bard.
More recent estimates, such as a 2023 McKinsey report, found that 63% of all working time in today’s developed economies is spent on tasks that could already be automated with current technology.
If adoption proceeds rapidly, half of that work could be automated by 2030.
But we know that AI will continue to progress – exponentially – until we have superhuman-level AI.”
This last paragraph is the most concerning because the actual impacts of exponentiality are not accounted for, in all their transformational power, in any study. They are, in fact, uncapturable by any human study today.
In other words, as bad as they are, the alarming projections might be wrong. On the low side.
By Pyr Marcondes, Senior Partner at Pipeline Capital.
Originally published on LinkedIn.
Read more technology articles:
- The historic and polemic moment when journalism becomes ChatGPT. By Pyr Marcondes
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