As CEOs continue to boast about laying off thousands while spending tens of billions of dollars on AI infrastructure, some execs are worried about getting the axe themselves.
During a podcast appearance this week, Google’s former chief business officer, Mo Gawdat, warned that AI could be poised to wipe out white-collar jobs, including cushy gigs like software developers and CEOs.
Unsurprisingly, Gawdat had his own AI startup to plug as well, a three-person operation dedicated to providing a Replika-like “AI girlfriend” service.
“That startup would have been 350 developers in the past,” the former Google exec boasted on a recent episode of the “Diary of a CEO” podcast, as spotted by Business Insider. “As a matter of fact, podcaster is going to be replaced.”
Gawdat is far from the first to suggest that high-ranking business executives could soon be out of a job due to AI automation. Experts have previously argued that the majority of a CEO’s tasks could be done by an AI.
But before an AI can fire them, company leaders are caught up in a race to lay off as many human workers as possible to cut costs in favor of AI, an endeavor that has even become a warped source of public bragging rights.
Gawdat’s perspective reflects the industry’s insatiable appetite for an ever-cheaper AI-driven future. During his podcast appearance, he warned that a superior AI in the form of an “artificial general intelligence” could soon result in huge swathes of jobs becoming obsolete overnight.
“AGI is going to get better at everything than humans — at everything, including being a CEO,” he said, as quoted by BI. “The one thing they don’t think of is AI will replace them, too.”
Gawdat warned of a “short-term dystopia,” which will allegedly kick off around the year 2027, marked by everybody losing their jobs, and the crumbling of economic structures.
But the potential is there, he said, for a utopian alternative filled with “laughter and joy… free healthcare, no jobs, and spending more time with their loved ones.”
Naturally, especially given his personal investments in the space, we should take Gawdat’s comments with an enormous grain of salt. Companies are continuing to pour astronomical sums of money into building out infrastructure to train and run incredibly resource-intensive AI models, despite so far failing to deliver on the huge financial returns their leadership has promised.
And some early attempts to automate entire jobs have already started backfiring, forcing companies to go back to the drawing board and admit that paying humans wages is a necessary evil.
Experts remain notably divided on how it will all play out. Some say menial labor is more likely to give way to AI, while others, including Gawdat and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, suggest that the days of cushy desk jobs could already be numbered.
As to whether either of those options is a desirable outcome? Debatable.
More on AI automation: CEO Lays Off 150 Employees, Tells Them They’ll Largely Be Replaced With AI
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