AI Fears Become Reality In The Tech Industry
Fears of AI taking over jobs is already becoming a reality in tech.
Fears of artificial intelligence costing people their jobs are already proving to be true.
Or at the very least, CEOs are now admitting to the technology's impact as AI-related layoffs ramp up, especially in the tech industry, reports Forbes' Richard Nieva. Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman is just the latest to say out loud that AI is already a threat to all kinds of jobs—including his. In an April memo to his 1,200 employees, he wrote: 'AI is coming for your jobs. Heck, it's coming for my job too.'
'I hear the conversation around the office. I hear developers ask each other, 'Guys, are we going to have a job in two years?'' Kaufman tells Forbes now. 'I felt like this needed validation from me—that they aren't imagining stuff.'
He joins the likes of Andy Jassy at Amazon, Anthropic's Dario Amodei and Shopify's Tobi Lutke in admitting that AI will replace humans in white-collar jobs, some going as far as predicting a 'white-collar bloodbath.'
The impacts are already being felt, particularly for young coders and entry-level workers. The total number of employed entry-level developers from ages 18 to 25 has dropped 'slightly' since 2022, after the launch of ChatGPT, said Ruyu Chen, a postdoctoral fellow at the Digital Economy Lab of Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered AI.
But not everything can, or should, be automated just yet. Take the buy-now-pay-later firm Klarna, for example, which last year slashed its workforce by 40% in part to the company's investments in AI. A year later, it launched a massive recruiting push for human customer service agents. 'We have noticed that in a world where everything is automated,' Klarna spokesperson Clare Nordstrom told Forbes, 'people put a premium on the human experience.'
Happy reading, and hope you have a lovely week!
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News from the world of work.
Looking for lower costs, different lifestyles and less toxic politics, more Americans are considering retiring abroad. In its annual Best Places To Retire Abroad, list, Forbes ranked the 24 countries and 96 spots that could make the most sense for retirees looking outside the U.S.
Beloved office snacks might soon be a thing of the past, thanks to Congress. Despite luring workers back into the office with the promise of free food, employers will no longer be able to deduct the cost of the food they provide for their employees as part of President Donald Trump's Big Beautiful Bill. The only exceptions: restaurants and the Alaskan fishing industry.
One seemingly innocuous kiss cam at a Boston Coldplay concert has caused quite the workplace drama at tech startup Astronomer, pushing the company into the internet's spotlight. Former CEO Andy Byron stepped down after being caught embracing chief people officer Kristin Cabot at the concert, while the company's cofounder and chief product officer Pete DeJoy has stepped up as interim chief executive.
More than half of U.S. companies are looking to pare back on health benefits as weight loss spending soars, according to Reuters. Increased cost sharing means employers could raise deductibles or maximum out-of-pocket costs, or even look beyond traditional pharmacy benefit managers, which act as middlemen between patients and insurers.
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There is the case of China, where earlier this century local authorities manipulated data to hit growth targets mandated by Beijing, forcing analysts and policymakers to turn to alternative measures to gauge the state of the country's economy. Advertisement Perhaps most famously, there is the case of Argentina, which in the 2000s and 2010s systematically understated inflation figures to such a degree that the international community eventually stopped relying on the government's data. That loss of faith drove up the country's borrowing costs, worsening a debt crisis that ultimately led to it defaulting on its international obligations. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up It is too soon to know whether the United States is on a similar path. 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But experts who just days ago were defending the integrity of the statistical agencies now find themselves asking uncomfortable questions about the trajectory of economic data in the United States. Advertisement 'If the poverty numbers come in and look great, is the director of the Census going to get a raise?' said Amy O'Hara, a former Census Bureau official who is now a professor at Georgetown University. 'If the household income numbers don't look great what happens then? What about GDP? What about CPI?' Andreas Georgiou knows the challenges of standing up to such political pressure. After he took over Greece's statistical agency in 2010, he found that the country has been severely understating its budget deficits. Those findings ran afoul of Greek authorities, who spent years trying to prosecute him on a variety of charges related to his work, despite independent reviews that supported his conclusions. 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Experts on the government statistics, including former commissioners in both Democratic and Republican administrations, have called foul on that accusation. The commissioner, who is the bureau's sole political appointee, does not control the numbers that the agency publishes, or even see them until they have been finalized by a staff of career technocrats whose careers typically span multiple presidential administrations. Advertisement Erica Groshen, who led the bureau under President Barack Obama, recalled getting resistance from the agency's staff when she tried to liven up the language of the monthly jobs reports. The bureau's staff insisted that the agency's job wasn't to say whether the glass was half-full or half-empty, only to report that, 'It is an eight-ounce container with four ounces of liquid.' Groshen relented. That is not to say political interference would be impossible. Government statistics rely on hundreds of methodological decisions, many of them judgment calls with no obviously correct answer. A sufficiently sophisticated agency head might, over time, be able to nudge the data in a politically advantageous direction, without any single decision being so egregious that it led to a mass resignation of career employees. 'I could imagine a new commissioner coming in and trying to make changes to those methods and procedures that try to move those numbers one way or the other,' said Katharine G. Abraham, who led the bureau during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. 'They would have to know a lot in terms of where to put the finger on the scale.' Private alternatives There are also blunter approaches. In Argentina in 2007, the government of then-President Néstor Kirchner pushed out the mathematician in charge of the country's consumer price data, then released an inflation figure that was dramatically lower than the one the mathematician had calculated. The public wasn't fooled. Nor were international bond investors, who ultimately turned to alternative sources of inflation data, calculated by researchers outside the government. Advertisement But such alternative sources are inherently limited, said Alberto Cavallo, a Harvard University economist who developed one of the most widely used private inflation indexes in Argentina. 'Private alternatives can complement official statistics, but they are not a substitute,' Cavallo wrote in an email. 'Government agencies have the resources and scale to conduct nationwide surveys -- something no private initiative can fully replicate.' Recently, Cavallo has been publishing data on consumer prices in the United States, which has shown the impact of Trump's tariffs more quickly than the government's data. But while such real-time sources are valuable, they don't carry the 'institutional credibility' of government data. The trouble is that once that credibility is eroded, it is hard to repair -- particularly at a time when partisans on both sides of the political aisle are skeptical of numbers put out by members of the opposing party. Nancy Potok, a former Census official who served as chief statistician of the United States during the first Trump administration, said that in the past there had been strong bipartisan support for the statistical system in Congress and the business community. But partisanship seems to have eroded that support at a moment when a combination of political pressures and long-standing budget challenges are making it most necessary. 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