By Kashmira Konduparty
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence will not lead to a global “jobs apocalypse” and the technology had not taken as many white collar jobs as he feared, according to a report by Reuters.
At the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) conference in Sydney, Altman said that the technological predictions made during the launch of ChatGPT in 2022 had been “roughly right,” but “pretty wrong” on the social and economic implications.
“I’m delighted to be wrong about this, I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened,” he told CBA Chief Executive Matt Comyn in the interview.
“People are like ‘oh you could have saved the world a lot of fear mongering and a lot of doom and gloom’ but at that time I was like ‘I see this is a real risk we should probably talk about it’ and it still may,” Altman added.
Several global companies, including HSBC, Amazon, Standard Chartered and Commonwealth Bank, have already announced that some roles within their organizations are being replaced or streamlined through the use of AI technologies.
Altman said he had realized that the “human part” of employment could not be replaced even with the rising use of AI in many industries and jobs.
He said that while he had been using AI to respond to Slack and email messages, “we really do care about our interactions with people and this thing, which is a huge amount of my time, it’s not something that I can imagine myself outsourcing to an AI anytime soon.”
That realization made him believe that human interaction is still very important in many jobs and it would not be replaced by AI. “It really, in both positive and negative ways, updated me to thinking that the jobs picture is likely to be very different than we thought,” he said.