Artificial Intelligence (AI) has begun taking over many jobs, whether you realize it or not. And we are not talking about boring robots replacing human labour in car assembly lines. While robots have long stolen human’s jobs in production lines, a new generation of smarter, more sophisticated machines – humanoids – have already been introduced by Dongfeng Motors in China.
Even if automation using robots cannot replace 100% human labour, factory automation is evolving rapidly. According to PwC, AI and related technologies, such as robots, drones and autonomous vehicles could displace around 26% of existing jobs in China over the next two decades. The number appears small, but considering that 12% employment in China is equivalent to 90 million jobs, that’s a huge impact.
From robots flipping burgers to humanoids performing cleaning jobs, AI is already replacing jobs at lightning speed – responsible for nearly 4,000 cuts made in May 2023 alone. In the United States, OpenAI – the company that created ChatGPT – estimated 80% of the U.S. workforce would have at least 10% of their jobs affected by large language models (LLMs).
As a guideline, if your job primarily consists of routine administrative tasks, you are in the danger zone of being replaced. According to a survey conducted by the World Economic Forum (WEF) 2024, 41% of employers across the globe have plans to fire you and replace you with an AI that can do your job. At risks are jobs like postal service clerks, payroll clerks, and executive secretaries.
AI and machines also automate tedious, repetitive work such as writing, coding, graphic designing and even music making. For example, musician Paul McCartney used AI to partially generate his late band-mate John Lennon’s voice to create a posthumous Beatles song. Even scammers are using AI to clone your voices when you answer your phone (U.S. lost US$2.7 billion to imposter scams in 2023 alone).
But according to Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, the effect of Artificial Intelligence could be more serious. Within the next 10 years, advances in AI could see human beings no longer needed “for most things” in the world. Even jobs initially thought to be safe like doctors and teachers could be replaced as AI will become free and common.
In an interview last month with Harvard University professor and happiness expert Arthur Brooks, Mr Gates said the world in entering a new era called “free intelligence”. The result will be rapid advances in AI-powered technologies that are accessible and touch nearly every aspect of our lives – from improved medicines and diagnoses to widely available AI tutors and virtual assistants.
However, the billionaire believes the sectors which are in the safe space as of now are coding, energy, and biology. He thinks that human programmers and coders, who are the architects of AI, will continue to remain an essential part in the workflow as they are very much essential for debugging issues as well as for refining and advancements of Artificial Intelligence.
Bill Gates argue that AI will always require people to build as well as manage it, hence the skills of coders or programmers will eventually become more and more valuable (provided the AI machines do not become the Terminator, and sends a cybernetic assassin called Arnold Schwarzenegger to assassinate Sarah Corner, whose unborn son will one day save mankind from extinction by Skynet).
And because Artificial Intelligence cannot replace human expertise in situations pertaining to crisis management and decision making, Gates also believes human intervention is a must in the energy sector – nuclear, oil and renewable energy – as AI will not be capable of handling the unpredictable nature of energy demands globally. Likewise, AI also will not be able to replace biologists.
That’s because artificial intelligence lacks the ability to do disease diagnosis and DNA analytics for scientific discoveries and research. Therefore, biologists will continue to play a very vital role when it comes to medical advancements as well as understanding life’s complexities. Of course, Bill Gates admits those were just his predictions and may not be foolproof as AI continues to evolve.
However, there are two schools of thoughts. Some experts say AI will help humans work more efficiently – rather than replacing them altogether – and boost economic growth that leads to more jobs being created. Others, like Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, think that AI will change what most jobs look like across nearly every industry, and have a “hugely destabilizing” impact on the workforce.
Despite the threat, billionaire Gates is optimistic about the overall benefits AI can provide to humanity, like “breakthrough treatments for deadly diseases, innovative solutions for climate change, and high-quality education for everyone. He believes certain types of jobs will likely never be replaced by AI, such as a baseball player. Labour intensive jobs – moving things and growing food – are most likely to be replaced.
Gates, who saw the AI revolution coming nearly a decade ago in 2017, said he would jump into AI when asked which industry he would focus on if he had to start over from scratch. He was fascinated with Google’s DeepMind AI, a British–American artificial intelligence research laboratory, that created a computer program that could defeat humans at the board game “Go”.
In 2023, Bill Gates wrote how he had seen two demonstrations of technology that struck him as revolutionary. The first time was in 1980, when he was introduced to a graphical user interface – the forerunner of every modern operating system, including Windows. The second time was in 2022 when he met with the team from OpenAI since 2016 and was impressed by their steady progress.
Excited about OpenAI, he gave them a challenge in mid-2022: train an artificial intelligence to pass an Advanced Placement biology exam. If the OpenAI team could make it capable of answering questions that it hasn’t been specifically trained for, Gates will consider it as a true breakthrough. He thought the challenge would keep them busy for two or three years. But they finished it in just a few months.
As investors, including companies like Nvidia, Broadcom and Super Micro Computer, poured US$500 billion into artificial intelligence data centre in the U.S. to support AI’s computing, storage and energy needs, Alibaba Chairman Joe Tsai has issued a warning at the HSBC Global Investment Summit in Hong Kong – the AI market has become a bubble.
Pointing to a couple of initiatives in the U.S. including the Stargate Project, a joint venture between U.S. start-up OpenAI and Japanese conglomerate SoftBank that includes a pledged investment of US$500 billion over the next four years, Joe Tsai said – “I start to get worried when people are building data centres on speculation. I start to see the beginning of some kind of bubble.”
On January 27, 2025, the U.S., supposedly the leader in Artificial Intelligence, experienced a “Sputnik moment” when its AI leadership was challenged by Chinese DeepSeek. The AI-powered chatbot was so stunning that even President Donald Trump described it as a “wake-up call” for US companies. Deepseek cost only US$6 million to train, a fraction of the “over US$100 million” burnt by OpenAI.
The sudden emergence of DeepSeek, a competitor to OpenAI and its ChatGPT tool, saw US$1 trillion wiped out from Nasdaq Composite in one day. Even Nvidia, a leading maker of the computer chips that power AI models, suffered the biggest fall in U.S. stock market history when its shares fell 17% – wiping nearly US$600 billion, while Google’s parent company lost US$100 billion and Microsoft US$7 billion.
Not only DeepSeek, founded in December 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, was developed cheaper and used less sophisticated chips, it also uses less memory than its rivals, ultimately reducing the cost to perform tasks for users. That combination of performance and lower cost helped DeepSeek’s AI assistant become the most-downloaded free app on Apple’s App Store when it was released in the US.
Hence, as AI will be a great disruption to existing business models in all parts of the economy, Bill Gates was absolutely right to predict that it could take over jobs in the medicine and education industry, just like how we have already seen in sectors like media, entertainment, finance, manufacturing, customer service, marketing, engineering, retail and even legal.
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March 27th, 2025 by financetwitter
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Comments
Hurray for AI which would definitely be ideal replace Bolehland’s half-baked or even useless, dumb and lazy civil servants, doctors, academics, and especially politicians. Used with robotics the replacements for our monkeys will even look better and definitely less fake at being pious and religious, and Bolehland will at last function like any thriving country should.
The dumped monkeys can balik kampong to an idle life which is what they cherish and what they are created for, anyway. Those dumped can use their time and energy to deeply and sincerely pursue their faith and become the clergy and the similarly deluded, though it does not mean they can go everywhere slapping people during their permanent leisure. That would be going back to the ways of the cave dwellers and living up the trees.
We shouldn’t be unduly worried about AI, we won’t end up anywhere in the grand scheme of things, like usual. If we keep running back to the Stone Age, we need not bother about modernity or civilisation. The way we are going we are certainly destined to go down the evolutionary ladder. In fact, a lot of our monkeys think and behave like they’re there already. We can, in fact, swear that quite a lot of our monkeys never left the Stone Age.
Anyway, with the level of our education which has gone worse over the years, we’ll never catch up with life after the talking snake (not that Mamakthir this time) in the Garden of Eden. Not that it is a totally bad thing being left out, ignorance is bliss, it is up to the Big Woman up the Sky what the fate of some of us should be. It’s2 Her Will and it does seem She wants to keep not too few of us ignorant, pig stupid, and stuck in the Garden of Eden, still with that talking snake, Alhamdullilah!
Btw, our Chinese uncles have been coming up with life-sized and quite realistic dolls that are now programmed with AI. With the big choice of beautiful robots our horny bastards can at last leave the kids, vulnerable women and even goats and chickens alone, thanks to our wonderful Chinese uncles!
Technocrafts are generally over optimistic about technologies especially when it comes to human behavior. No doubt a portion of the population will benefit from AI but what Bill Gates suggested will never happen.