AI ‘may replace 30-50% of today’s jobs’: Bahrain

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Artificial intelligence (AI) may replace people to carry out between 30 and 50 per cent of the jobs we know today, predicts a renowned Norwegian transformation leader.Jennifer Vessels, one of the keynote speakers at the three-day 10th Bahrain International eGovernment Forum, believes the world needs to prepare for the changes to come.“It is important for us to manage, empower, encourage, create and facilitate AI for our survival,” she said. “AI could be used to do things we don’t like, or things we are not good at doing,” added Ms Vessels.“With AI taking this space, there will be time for people to create something new or rethink what the future holds.

Around 30 to 50pc of the jobs we know will no longer be relevant and this is an opportunity to create and carve out new careers and opportunities that people can embark on.”Ms Vessels has led global transformation programmes for Adobe, Cisco, Google, Genentech and hundreds of the world’s largest organisations.Other experts agree and suggest AI could threaten many white-collar positions, by automating what they describe as ‘mid-career, mid-ability’ work. A recent Goldman Sachs study found that generative AI tools might affect 300 million full-time jobs worldwide, which could lead to a ‘significant disruption’ in the job market.Ironically, tech jobs such as software developers, web developers, computer programmers, coders and data scientists could be most at risk because AI like ChatGPT is good at crunching numbers with relative accuracy.Media jobs across the board, including those in advertising, technical writing and any role that involves content creation are under threat because AI is able to read, write and understand text-based data.

Likewise, jobs in the legal industry could face the axe too because paralegals and legal assistants are responsible for consuming large amounts of information, synthesising what they learned, then making it ‘digestible through a legal brief or opinion’, highlighted businessinsider.com.However, when one door closes another, hopefully, opens. Deep learning engineers, AI chatbot developers, prompt engineers and data annotators are set to be in great demand in the future.