According to the IBM boss, AI will kill that many office jobs

The computer group IBM wants to hire fewer people for some jobs because their activities can be taken over by software based on artificial intelligence (AI).

He expects that around a third of the jobs in human resources management can be replaced by AI and automation in five years, said IBM boss Arvind Krischna the financial service Bloomberg in an interview published on Monday.

Because of this, hiring for such clerical work is being suspended or slowed down, Krishna said. IBM employs around 26,000 people who have no direct contact with customers.

According to the US group, some of the vacancies will not be filled. In contrast, software development and areas with customer contact will continue to be discontinued. IBM has a total of around 260,000 employees.

ChatGPT is causing a stir

The text machine ChatGPT, Google’s competitor software Bard and programs that can generate images based on text descriptions are currently causing a stir. ChatGPT, for example, formulates texts by estimating the likely continuation of a sentence word by word.

One consequence of this programming is that the software invents not only correct information but also completely incorrect information – but the user cannot see any difference. Because of this, there are concerns that their skills will be used, for example, to produce and spread misinformation. However, experts believe that this problem can be solved.

It is still unclear whether new jobs will compensate for the loss of old jobs in the future. In 2015, Markus Koch, head of the consulting firm Deloitte Switzerland, referred to earlier industrial revolutions with consequences for the labor market on the SRF program “Eco”. Many jobs have shifted from agriculture to the industrial and service sectors. The difference is that this time the change will happen faster and will take place across all sectors.

(dsc/sda/dpa)

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