A tech billionaire who predicted the rise of social media has now said that nine to five work will become ‘extinct’ in the next decade.
And it looks like it could all be down to the advancements of artificial intelligence.
Tech mogul and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman has made the bold claim that our working patterns could soon be a thing of the past.
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In a resurfaced interview, Hoffman said: “You may not only work at multiple companies during your career, you may work at multiple industries. Industries are changing, your own path changes... you may not actually do a lot of your work fully as an employee, you may actually be working in the gig economy, or you may have two or three gigs.
“All of these things are the directional changes from what we've seen in the workforce for the last few decades.”
And he doesn’t necessarily see the rise of AI as a bad thing.
He went on to say: “It actually does create a lot of opportunity, it does create a lot of productivity, but it also creates a lot of uncertainty and people like stability. So one of our challenges as we figure it out is how do we minimize a little bit of the uncertainty, increase a little bit of the stability, while continuing to have the kind of opportunity, productivity and flexibility.”
Hoffman doesn’t believe that AI will completely overtake human jobs but instead he believes that it will act as a personal assessment, making our work and lives much easier.
He said: “All the way to being a radiologist, or lawyer, or coder, all of those things will have an AI personal assistant for doing it and that will change things; change industries and everything else. The good news is that AI can be part of the solution.”
And while there will be certain jobs that are at risk of becoming automated, Hoffman reckons that AI will be there to help those people looking for work.
He added: “Truck drivers - of which we have a shortage right now - maybe that will eventually all be autonomous vehicles and you say: well what happens to the truck drivers? Well, we create AI assistants that help those people.
“Let’s say, what else is possible for you? How do you learn that job? How do you get that job? How do you do that job? And the thing that we should be wanting as a society is the AI to help everybody in whatever they’re doing.”