Recently, Nobel Prize winner in economics Christopher Pissarides publicly stated that the knowledge and skills of "mathematics, physics and chemistry" in the traditional sense will be replaced by AI. And if most of human jobs disappear, how will we survive?

Recently, Christopher Pissarides, the 2010 Nobel Prize winner in economics and professor at the London School of Economics (LSE), publicly stated that in the near future, the traditional knowledge and skills of "mathematics, physics and chemistry" will be replaced by AI.


The labor market economist has warned younger generations against rushing into science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subjects, saying "empathy" and creative skills are likely to flourish in a world dominated by artificial intelligence.

The London School of Economics (LSE) professor warned that workers in certain IT jobs could be sowing the "seeds of self-destruction" by advancing artificial intelligence technology that could eventually replace the jobs of its developers in the future.

“The skills that are needed now — collecting data, organizing the data, developing the data, and using it to develop the next stage of AI, or to have AI do more work — will make the STEM skills needed now obsolete because AI will be doing those jobs in the future,” he said in an interview.

"While these jobs are growing, they are still not growing at the amount needed to accept all STEM graduates because AI is designed to replace these jobs."

While Professor Pissarides is optimistic about the overall impact of artificial intelligence on the job market, he expressed concerns about students who decide to study STEM subjects in hopes of taking advantage of technological advancements.

He said that despite the current rapid growth in demand for STEM skills, jobs requiring more traditional face-to-face skills, such as hospitality and healthcare, would continue to dominate the job market.

Back in April last year, Pissarides predicted that generative AI would enable employees to be more productive and thus spend less time on work tasks.

With the help of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, the four-day work week may become a common norm.

A month ago, in an interview with Fortune magazine, he further explained that his April prediction was reasonable.

There is growing evidence that a shortened working week is bound to happen as a result of tools like ChatGPT.

Will AI destroy the labor market?

And if workers’ working hours continue to shrink as economists predict, what will happen in the end?

Last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once said in an interview with The Atlantic Monthly that in his opinion, "artificial intelligence will definitely make many jobs disappear without any conditions attached."


In this long interview, Altman described to reporters in an almost cruel manner the impact and impact of AI on the labor market and society in his opinion.

“I wonder how today’s workers — especially white-collar workers — would fare if we were suddenly surrounded by artificial general intelligence. Would general artificial intelligence be our assistants or our replacements?”

Altman raised such a soul torture. As a migrant worker, I really don’t want to answer it with my own personal experience one day in the future.

Maybe by that time, workers themselves are not qualified to answer such questions, but can only accept the answers to this question from others (such as bosses).


In March last year, researchers from Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, and New York University conducted a study hoping to find out what impact large language models will have on the labor market in future society.

They predict that artificial intelligence will first target highly educated white-collar workers and may replace most white-collar occupations.

The paper's appendix contains a chilling list of occupations:

Management analysts, lawyers, professors, teachers, judges, financial advisors, real estate agents, loan officers, psychologists, and human resources and public relations professionals—and, in their view, the professions affected go well beyond these jobs.

Moreover, for society as a whole, if jobs in these fields suddenly disappear overnight, many countries will experience a huge reshuffle of the professional class.

Just as the advent of the automobile put wagons permanently out of business, Honda cars are to horses what GPT-10 is to us.

Of course, just as the emergence of cars created various other jobs in the logistics industry, drivers, and the travel industry, AI will certainly create jobs that do not exist now.

But Altman said he has no idea what new jobs AI will create in the future.

He tended to believe that humans in the future would not need to work because perhaps no one was born to like to work.

Altman even described another situation that was even more unacceptable:


Previous technological revolutions were controllable because they occurred slowly over several generations, but Altman has stated publicly that the technological revolution brought about by AI will come very quickly.

"The marginal cost of intelligence will fall to near zero within 10 years. In this scenario, the earning power of many workers will decline dramatically. This will result in a transfer of wealth from labor to owners of capital. This transfer is so large that it can only be compensated by massive countervailing redistribution."

Could a universal basic income be the answer?

In the face of the possible shrinkage of the job market in the future, more and more people are beginning to call that if AI really replaces human jobs, humans need Universal Basic Income (UBI) to ensure social stability and prosperity.


At a forum in November, former US President Barack Obama flagged concerns about the rising rise of artificial intelligence and its potential impact on society and the workplace, but said transformative and disruptive technologies "are not going away."

“It’s hard to find an example in human history of something being invented and not being used. Whether it was the printing press, gunpowder or computers. In fact, as AI models become more sophisticated, technological disruption will only accelerate.”

If AI makes jobs disappear altogether, "we may need to think about bigger changes and we should start talking about things like a shorter work week or a universal basic income."

And Sam Altman has gone a step further and has begun to distribute money to all mankind.

He launched the WorldCoin project in July last year, hoping to establish an "AI-based" "global basic income" system.

As long as your face and irises are scanned in front of scanning machines around the world to prove that you are a human being, you will receive the cryptocurrency - WorldCoin - issued by the system.


Ordinary users only need to stare at the "iris scanner" camera and wait for 10 seconds to complete the confirmation work.

The next step is for the system to assign a unique number to each iris scan, which is checked against a large database to ensure that each user only has that scan. If the confirmation is complete, the sphere beeps again and the user is added to the database.

So far, nearly 3 million people around the world have registered for WorldCoin and completed iris scanning.

In December 2023, World Coin will upgrade everyone's authentication method to WorldID2.0, which can bind the ID to your own online account.

All users will continue to receive "World Coin Tokens" issued by the system as a specific form of basic human income.

References:

https://the-decoder.com/nobel-laureate-warns-younger-generations-against-studying-stem-because-ai-could-take-over