By 2045, robots and artificial intelligence could abolish most human jobs, according to Adam Dorr, research director at Rethinkx think tanks.
In an interview with the Guardian on Wednesday, Dorr warned that the machines are moving so quickly that humans can do almost any job within a generation, and can do it at a low cost and at equal or superior quality.
Drawn from a pattern of historical confusion, he compared today's workforce to horses in the car era, or traditional cameras in the digital photography era.
“We are horses, we are film cameras,” he said.
Dorr and his research team document over 1,500 major technological transformations. In most cases, he said that when technology gains a few percentage points of market share, it usually dominates immediately within 15-20 years.
“The machines that we can think of as being here are expanding every day, except for the end of their capabilities,” he said. “It's not too long to prepare for this.”
Still, he said that not all jobs are doomed to extinction. Dorr believes a narrow set of roles could survive, especially from the acquisition of AI, which is based on human connection, trust, and ethical complexity.
He pointed out sex workers, sports coaches, politicians and ethicists as examples of jobs that can remain relevant.
“In some areas, there will remain a niche of human labor,” he said. “The problem is that it's not close to enough occupations to hire 4 billion people.”
Dorr argued that the looming upheaval could lead to a ton of inequality or what he called “super-provisional.” However, achieving the latter, he said, requires bold experimentation on how to define work, value and ownership.
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“This may be one of the most surprising things that happen to humanity,” he said.
The debate about AI takeover is intensifying
Several top AI researchers and technology leaders share Dorr's concerns, although they have different views on which jobs will endure.
Jeffrey Hinton, often referred to as the “AI Godfather,” warned that “common intellectual labor” is at its most risk. In his June CEO Podcast's diary, he said he was “terrifying” to work as a call centre or paralegal.
Hinton believes practical roles like Plumbing are safer, at least for now, and says it will take a long time until AI is as “good at physical manipulation” as people do.
In May, humanity CEO Dario Amodei told Axios he believes that half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, including technology, finance, legal and consulting roles, could disappear within five years.
However, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Meta's Yann Lecun pushed back by saying that AI would transform rather than completely eliminate the work.
Openai CEO Sam Altman also said that AI will drive away many roles, but believes new roles will emerge even if they appear “silly and stupid” over time. “We were always really good at understanding what we had to do,” he said.
MIT economist David Autor took a darker view: AI can't wipe out work, but it can make people's skills worthless, leading the “Mad Max” economy where many fight in a reduced pool of valuable work.
