Responsible AI was a hot topic at Canada’s biggest tech conference. There were numerous Collision panels on the subject, and questions about risks were routinely posed to the likes of Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez and pioneering researcher Geoffrey Hinton. Part of that conversation was job loss or, as it was routinely referred to, “displacement.”
A lot of people think the good will outweigh the bad. Gomez said he didn’t foresee people losing jobs, before adjusting to say that certain roles will be lost, but that AI’s benefits would be a net positive. Elsewhere, Spencer McLeod of VC fund G Squared, used Klarna — which boasted about AI being able to replace 700 jobs — as a positive example of getting more value from AI.
That's out of touch with one of the public’s top concerns about AI. More than half of Canadians believe more jobs will be lost than created, and we can see why. Job listings have dropped for things from graphic design to writing. McDonald’s ended an IBM partnership on AI drive-thrus to see if it could make them faster with a different partner. Calling this “displacement” obscures the fact that, even if AI makes some of our jobs easier, a lot of others will be left in the cold.