All of this to say: it's still too early to see how this shakes out. AGI changes the calculus completely, of course, but I'm not so sure various flavors of GPT alone will disrupt the job market.
Don't know why you would ask these people instead of, say, researchers.
Speaking personally and a bit more cynically, these execs likely have _no_ clue what they are talking about and care about little more than money and status.
If it’s possible. Hertz buying every Tesla didn’t make the EV transition happen quicker.
Sure. But if they lay off their workforce and AI doesn't deliver, no amount of executive cajoling will make it do what it can't do. In the same way that an executive who refuses to deploy AI will be outcompeted by those who do (if it works), the one who overenthusiastically deploys it will be outcompeted by those who didn't.
In making such a mistake, this subthread is no longer about AI vs employees, it’s about avoiding red herrings in the discussion.
In one sense, each of us individually participates in creating the future and occasionally some special person changes the world significantly or advances the state of the art all on their own, a brilliant scientist or artist and so on.
But most of the work creating the future is a team effort, not a solidarity one. You need many, many people all pulling in the same direction. And for all those people to coordinate, you need leaders to sell the vision, raise the money and pay the team. Sure there are other kinds of human organizing, but companies create a large share of innovation vs. governments and academia. Execs are the people most responsible for choosing what companies spend their resources on.
And for practical example, Mark Zuckerberg was for whatever reason, interested in VR existing as an everyday consumer experience. He scooped up a promising team working on a prototype, then directed untold billions at pulling VR out of the research lab and into millions of homes. It’s not obvious that VR was worth the investment and still isn’t. Minus the decisions of Mark Zuckerberg, would any VR headsets from any company exist for consumers? Unknown, but I believe no technology is inevitable. Our choices matter and the choices of very rich and powerful people matter all the more.
If you work at a company where the CTO says "your performance bonus will be partially based on what a code analysis tool like SonarQube says about your code", then your future and the future of other similar people in your organization will be created following that path.
They dictate which direction projects/milestones get prioritized + what fashion they get implemented in.
It's great to have a scapegoat for all manner of issues as AI has been categorised as, though!
As an example the help desk function is likely to be transformed. Loan processors (the people reading your basic loan application details), farther out the underwriters approving a loan and at what rate. These functions are easy targets for AI to transform. It’s a highly repeatable role with lots of historical data. All that’s missing is some software guardrails placed around the models.
Speculating with motivation (company profits) and "decision making" privileges means they will most likely attempt/be at the cutting edge of implementation (trying to cut whatever applicable jobs they can and replace with AI with good results)
They're not predicting the future, they're announcing it. It's up to the population to get over themselves and deal with it.