AI caramba! How AI will affect the future workforce

Six years ago, California employers were reeling from COVID-related workplace restrictions, including rules prohibiting or restricting attendance at the office. Personal privacy rights were jettisoned, as everybody’s private health and medical details became everybody else’s business. The sense of stability that once came from sitting at a Rodeo Drive or Montgomery Street address was gone. The disruption caused by the work-at-home model was soon replaced by the challenge of bringing people back to the office and engineering the details of their return. Even that was easier said than done once employees tasted the benefits of a work-at-home model. But those efforts, too, have now been supplanted by the latest disruption in office work: the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into the human workforce. 

AI workplace disruption 

As we reported in the last issue, Governor Gavin Newsom has assigned all levels of state government the task of creating a strategic plan to address the anticipated AI workplace disruption. If Newsom’s scope of solutions seems generic and unspecific, it may be because there is so much disagreement over what the workplace effect of AI is. 

The bruhaha may have started because of the comment made by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who stated that AI might wipe out 50% of entry-level tech, legal, consulting, and finance jobs within five years. In March, Anthropic published an empirical map of AI’s penetration into the labor market, finding that, in business and finance occupations, AI could theoretically cover 94% of tasks.