Something I think about a lot is the job displacement that will come once the AI future is fully realized. Leaders have reached a general consensus about two things: First, the number of jobs replaced by AI will be massive; and second, there aren’t many good solutions for helping displaced workers. Most seem to assume that lots of free time and some form of universal basic income—where governments and businesses pay people a living stipend out of their huge new AI-generated surplus of profits and tax revenue—will become the new normal.
Fortune 500 companies are already laying off thousands of employees, or actively are not hiring for roles that could be replaced in the future by AI. With the announcements coming almost every week, it’s easy to wonder if many people could be working in the last full-time job they will ever have.
This is a problem that’s likely to hit white-collar and blue-collar workers equally hard. Amazon (No. 2) is one of the latest companies to announce major cuts, announcing in October that it would eliminate about 14,000 corporate jobs. But as Fortune’s Jason Del Rey writes, the company is also sending signals that the robot-driven unemployment era is upon us.
Jason cites a recent Amazon memo that suggested that the company’s fleet of robots—many of them animated and guided by AI—could eliminate the need to hire for some 600,000 future jobs.
“A significant reshaping of work is underway, and it remains to be seen where it leaves workers,” he writes. “The hope is that AI truly does ‘extend human capacity,’ as an Amazon executive told me. The problem is that it’s still unclear what that will look like in practice, long term.”
For more on Amazon and the era of robot job replacement, check out Jason’s piece here.
