As workers worry that they could lose their jobs to AI in the future, some experts claim it’s already happening.
Instead of letting their employees “quiet quit,” employers are “silent firing,” or making the roles so hard that workers quit and, subsequently, are replaced by artificial intelligence.
George Kailas, the CEO of Prospero.Ai and Fast Company contributor, claims this is why Amazon is forcing employees to come into the office five days a week despite the majority of the workforce expressing dissatisfaction with the return-to-office policy.
As a result, 73% of workers considered quitting, one survey found.
Kailas alleges that, despite some data that proves remote work boosts productivity, companies like Amazon are “silently firing workers” by enforcing such policies, “because the best way to decrease retention while saving on severance would be to remove remote work,” he wrote.
“What makes this even more alarming is that we have not even scratched the surface of the AI adoption curve,” Kailas added.
While Elon Musk expects a complete overhaul of the workforce as a result of AI, experts aren’t so convinced.
Economist and MIT professor Daron Acemoglu insists that only 5% of jobs can be replaced or assisted by AI within the next 10 years.
“A lot of money is going to get wasted,” he previously told Bloomberg. “You’re not going to get an economic revolution out of that 5%.”
He argued that AI is not reliable yet to complete the tasks humans do and predicted the technology won’t be advanced enough anytime soon.
“You need highly reliable information or the ability of these models to faithfully implement certain steps that previously workers were doing,” Acemoglu continued.
“They can do that in a few places with some human supervisory oversight … but in most places they cannot.”
Worries about an AI job revolution come as Gen Z fuels another workplace trend dubbed the “Great Detachment.” A cousin of “quiet quitting” and “quiet vacationing,” workplace detachment refers to a decline in employee engagement due to dissatisfied workers.
Poll data from Gallup found a decrease in Gen Z and young millennial engagement by 5%, and American Staffing Association CEO Richard Wahlquist told Business Insider that an estimated three in 10 employees overall are not actively engaged at work.
Disengagement, per Gallup, also leads to a financial hit.
It costs the world approximately $8.8 trillion in productivity, the organization said.