More statistics than solutions at Davos as AI threatens jobs

AT THE World Economic Forum in Davos last week, the fate of employees was foremost on great minds. These minds had no shortage of numbers to offer.

For starters, almost 40 per cent of jobs worldwide are exposed to artificial intelligence (AI), an International Monetary Fund (IMF) report said. There can be an upside to such exposure; a PwC survey found that 64 per cent of chief executive officers globally expect generative AI to make workers more productive over the next 12 months. How productive? There was a number for that too. Bill Gates reckoned last week that AI was increasing coders’ productivity by as much as 50 per cent.

As lesser minds boggled at these numbers, there were also stark pronouncements to contemplate. In an interview, DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman warned that, unfettered, AI products were “fundamentally labour-replacing tools”.