In AI world, I am going to lose my job, you are going to lose your job, everyone is going to lose their job

India Today

26-05-2025

This morning, I woke up feeling like Oprah Winfrey from that viral clip in which she is distributing cars. You get a car, and you get a car, and you get a car, she tells the audience who were sitting on her TV show. It's just that instead of cars, in my mind, I was thinking of pink slips. You see, I am still reeling from the AI whirlwind that Google unleashed on the world a few days ago at the I/O 2025 conference. Before we could all settle, came the salvo from Anthropic on Thursday night, revealing its new AI models called Claude 4 Sonnet and Claude 4 Opus.advertisementToo much AI is happening too fast. And it is natural to think that I am going to lose my job, you are going to lose your job, and everyone is going to lose their job. That is, if you are like me, trying to keep track of all the AI that is coming our way. Or if you happen to hear Sholto Douglas, a researcher at Anthropic, who said in a podcast: 'I think we're near guaranteed at this point to have (AI) models that are capable of automating any white-collar job by 2027 by 2028.'Scratch the record, like they do in movies, and let's recap. Let's start with I/O 2025 on Tuesday and where Google showed and demoed:
— A real-time audio translation tool: And here goes the job of all translators, unless you specialise in speaking some exotic Amazonian language, in which case, just wait a few years because AI will come for that too.advertisement— Stitch: A tool that creates a user interface and codes for it within minutes. And just like that, UI designers are at the risk of extinction.— Jules: This AI fellow codes after getting a task. It's an AI agent, which means you give it a task, and it will try to do A-Z when it comes to coding and software development. It joins OpenAI Codex and Anthropic Claude and Microsoft GitHub Copilot, which too, are supposedly great at coding. I have a feeling that coders and software engineers would not be feeling great about Jules, Codex and Claude.— Imagen 4: This one creates photographs and posters and other such materials. It can follow and accurately put in text in a poster or image when you tell it to do so. Combine it with the excellent OpenAI image tool — of Ghibli fame — and Midjourney. Already you can cut down design departments in half and you probably won't lose anything.— Veo 3 and Flow: How many people can a simple video production involve and employ? Actors, camera persons, lighting assistants, production staff, VFX creators, makeup artists and countless others. Well, I am certain that none of them are going to be happy about Google Veo 3 and Flow, which, even at this early stage of AI-generated videos, have the potential to obliterate jobs in creative industries. And content creators? Well, they are cooked too, if Veo 3 is any indication, because creating content is now a matter of minutes.advertisementEven comedians and news anchors are not safe. Because Veo 3 can do their job too, with its ability to not just create video but also accompanying audio, such as a piece of news or a funny joke.— Google Search AI Mode: Oh, this one hits closer home. As a tech journalist, my job is to bring information about tech and gadgets to my readers. Other journalists, too, are primarily in the business of providing information. Google Search AI Mode means information will be directly available on Google's homepage. No need to visit a news site to read how good the latest iPhone is. My job is toast. Or making toast somewhere, which is at least safe until, in a few years, we get robots who can cook eggs — sunny-side up if you will prefer that.This is just from one Google event. Combine it with what we already have, and how people and companies have already started using AI tools, and you get:advertisement— AI is now already doing a lot of work in the offices of doctors, by analysing symptoms and reading diagnostic scans.— There are studies that AI is better at teaching students compared to many accomplished school and college teachers.— Tools like Deep Research and Deep Think can create reports and analysis that can rival the work done by junior analysts, or in some cases, even the work done by career-analysts.— For most writing, unless it is top-level creative writing, the current AI tools are fairly competent and better than most humans. Yes, it writes poems too, like a lovelorn teenager roaming the streets of Paris in the 1920s.— AI tools are getting quite good at mapping spaces and doing the work of interior designers and even architects.Lots of jobs are on the line. Even the jobs of terrorists and intelligence officials! I haven't told you about Claude 4 yet. Apparently, this AI model is so good that Anthropic found it could help people create crude chemical and biological weapons. Well, there goes the job of expert terrorists who excel at bomb-making. But then, because it is so good, this rascally Claude 4 will also reportedly alert the police and the press — I wonder why the press — if someone asks it for help in creating a weapon. Both the criminal and the undercover agent are going to be AI!advertisementJokes aside, what does it all mean? Are we, like the Anthropic researcher says, going to lose our white-collar jobs by 2028? Theoretically, I am certain that millions of jobs are going to be made redundant by AI. Practically, I have my doubts. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how a huge percentage of jobs no longer function the productivity role in a society or economy. Instead, they exist for political reasons. And that makes me confident that even in the world of AI, jobs for humans will exist.But it is also easy to see that the nature of work will change significantly. That, I believe, would be a disruption big enough to cause seismic shifts in ways that are not apparent at the moment. Work is a subject that fascinates me. It fascinates me because it is the only bulwark against the existentialist dread that otherwise threatens to overwhelm us humans. When AI comes for our work, I believe human society will have to undergo some fundamental shifts. What shapes these shifts will take, we will know when we reach that point. The good news — or bad, depending on how you see all of this — won't be long before we reach that point.(Javed Anwer is Technology Editor, India Today Group Digital. Latent Space is a weekly column on tech, world, and everything in between. The name comes from the science of AI and to reflect it, Latent Space functions in the same way: by simplifying the world of tech and giving it a context)(Views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author)Trending Reel