AI industry insiders want workers to code smarter, think harder and lean into their humanity — but still dodge the question of how many jobs artificial intelligence will destroy.<\/p>\n
The reassurance rang out across HumanX, a four-day conference drawing some 6,500 investors, entrepreneurs and tech executives, even as a blunt advertisement at the entrance set the tone: “Stop hiring humans.”<\/p>\n
On the main stage, May Habib, chief executive of an AI platform called Writer, told the audience that Fortune 500 bosses are having a “collective panic attack” on the subject.<\/p>\n
The anxiety is well-founded. More and more companies are directly citing AI in announcing job cuts.<\/p>\n
High-profile examples are on the rise: Salesforce laid off 4,000 customer support workers, saying AI now handles 50 percent of its work.<\/p>\n
Block chief Jack Dorsey announced plans to cut the company’s headcount nearly in half, citing “intelligence tools” that have fundamentally changed how companies operate.<\/p>\n
Not all claims have gone uncontested — some economists say firms are pointing to AI to rationalize layoffs that are really about past overhiring or cost-cutting ahead of massive infrastructure investments.<\/p>\n
OpenAI’s Sam Altman has spoken of “AI-washing,” and most speakers at the San Francisco event similarly dismissed the invocation of AI as a false pretext for job cuts — even as they freely predicted disruption was just around the corner.<\/p>\n
AI is going to “transform every single company, every single job, every single way that we do work,” said Matt Garman, chief executive of cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services.<\/p>\n
‘Pretty unsettling’<\/p>\n
The debate remains heated. Two years ago, Nvidia chief Jensen Huang declared that the ultimate goal was to make it so “nobody has to program” or code.<\/p>\n
“We will look back on that as some of the worst career advice ever given,” Andrew Ng, founder of training platform DeepLearning.AI, shot back on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
In his view, coding is not an obsolete skill — AI has simply made it available to more people.<\/p>\n
Another argument has taken hold in Silicon Valley: interpersonal skills will become more valuable than ever, with some voices going so far as to tout a humanities education as sound tech career preparation.<\/p>\n
“As AI can do more of a job, the things that will distinguish and differentiate a given employee are going to be the human skills — critical thinking, communication, teamwork,” said Greg Hart, chief executive of training platform Coursera, which has seen enrollment in its critical thinking courses triple over the past year.<\/p>\n
Florian Douetteau, chief executive of Dataiku, a French company specializing in enterprise AI, agreed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The real human added value, he told AFP, is the “capacity for judgment.”<\/p>\n
He described a world in which an AI agent works through the night, its human counterpart reviews the results in the morning, and then the agent resumes working autonomously during the lunch break.<\/p>\n
But the entrepreneur nevertheless expressed unease.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“We are going to have a generation of people who will never have written anything from start to finish in their entire lives,” he said. “That’s pretty unsettling.”<\/p>\n
‘Mistake was not preparing’<\/p>\n
All of this advice risks ringing hollow for a generation already struggling to land a first job.<\/p>\n
AI has automated entry-level tasks that once served as on-the-job training. Hiring of candidates with less than one year of experience fell 50 percent between 2019 and 2024 among America’s major tech companies, according to a study by investment fund SignalFire.<\/p>\n
“We should be preparing for the loss of knowledge work jobs in a number of categories,” warned former US vice president Al Gore.<\/p>\n
As the week’s lone genuinely dissenting voice, Gore called for a real action plan to map threatened jobs and prepare workers for career transitions, so as not to repeat the mistakes of the globalization era.<\/p>\n
“The mistake was not globalization. The mistake was in not preparing for the consequences of globalization,” he said, drawing a parallel with the deindustrialization that followed the offshoring wave of the 2000s.<\/p>\n
“Maybe we don’t want to talk about it,” he added, “because it may slow down the enthusiasm for the technology.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AI industry insiders want workers to code smarter, think harder and lean into their humanity — but still…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":395205,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-395204","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=395204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395204\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/395205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=395204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=395204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=395204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}