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Prime minister Narendra Modi, at the recent AI Action Summit in Paris, said that AI will not lead to job loss, it will just change the nature of work. He said that “history has shown that work does not disappear due to technology, it’s nature changes. New types of jobs are created.” However, to quote Modi again, job loss is AI’s “most feared disruption”. How should people not worry about AI taking away jobs when prominent names working on the technology are all ringing alarms about it?
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Reiterating what Google CEO Sundar Pichai had said a while back, Google chief scientist Jeff Dean says that AI is writing 25 per cent of Google’s software right now. He says that Google has already trained a Gemini model on its internal codebase to help the developers at the company.
Code generated using AI is really changing the responsibilities of software engineers at companies like Google. Developers and engineers now have to focus more on reviewing and refining the work that is produced by AI, instead of writing the basics themselves. This shift obviously allows them to concentrate on more complex tasks that AI isn’t capable of handling. However, AI will soon be smarter and will be abloe to handle everything a junior coder does. At least that’s what the current speed of technological advancement indicates.
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While many have said that AI would just be an assistant to the developers, how do you explain the layoffs that companies like Google have been doing in the name of “AI restructuring”? In January 2024, Google also laid off 1,000 employees because of AI restructuring. Last year, there was also a report that Google was mulling laying off 30,000 employees due to new AI innovations.
Parallelly, Open AI CEO Sam Altman recently rang alarms on AI and job loss when he wrote about the capabilities of AI agents in a recent blog post. Altman said that AI agents will soon be able to do everything a software engineer at a top company, with a few years of experience, is capable of doing. He said that AI agents will start functioning as virtual co-workers. In a separate post, Sam Altman has also claimed that in 2025, AI agents will become a part of the workforce.
Google is also not the only company integrating AI into the organisation’s internal workflow. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also revealed recently that the company is working on AI agents, which could eventually replace mid-level software engineers in writing and reviewing code.