Normally when we think about the rise of the machines and their destruction of our way of life, our minds would go to something like Terminator and a cruel, uncaring robot stomping on a human skull.
However, given the world is supposed to end not with a bang but with a whimper, perhaps it’s more fitting that AI will wipe us out by shuffling us out of jobs until we’re all broke.
Lots of workplaces are treating AI like their favourite new toy as they work out how best to use it, with many of their ideas based around how they can get the computer to do people’s jobs for them so they don’t need to keep hiring humans.
Of course, there are problems with getting rid of humans. AI still has a lot of development to go through, and just getting rid of people while expecting that technology can do their jobs without them has already left some places embarrassed as they realised why you need humans to do things.
New research by the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development (CIPD) made for grim reading as they found that one in six employers (17 percent) were expecting to cut jobs and replace them with AI over the next year.
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Companies are looking at replacing more jobs with AI (Malte Mueller/Getty Images)
As for where these job losses are expected to land, there are seven sectors identified as most likely for the cuts to fall.
Admin
The biggest area businesses expect to shed staff is among the ranks of the clerical, administrative and junior management team members, as 62 percent of employers reckon the people sorting out all the admin will be downsized to make way for AI.
Management & sales teams
Next on the chopping block are managers, with 28 percent of companies expecting to shed some people from that layer of their workforce, while 27 percent reckon they’ll be slashing the sales and services teams and having AI pick up the slack.
It’s junior worker who are most likely to lose their jobs in the next year (Getty Stock Photo)
Manual labour
Just under a quarter (23 percent) of workplaces expect semi-skilled or unskilled manual labourers to be downsized by AI.
13 percent are looking at getting rid of skilled manual labourers, though this is a job AI and robotics have struggled to do thus far, while one in 10 businesses are looking at replacing foremen and supervisors with artificial intelligence.
Degree-educated
Meanwhile, one in six (17 percent) expect that technical professionals and degree-educated employees are going to be given their marching orders.
On the other hand, this sudden and rapid rise in AI may be indicative of a bubble, with a number of major investors concerned at the lack of returns from the money poured into AI and fearful that tech company valuations have been inflated far beyond their actual worth.
Michael Burry, the famous investor from The Big Short, has bet a whopping £840 million ($1.1 billion) on the idea that the AI bubble will burst.
The man who successfully predicted the global financial crisis has bet against software company Palantir and chipmaker Nvidia.
Meanwhile, Microsoft founder Bill Gates has also warned that we’re in an AI bubble similar to the dot-com bubble, which burst after people called bulls**t on the valuations of various internet companies which weren’t actually making money for all the cash people had poured into the shiny new thing.
That bubble bursting didn’t stop the rise of the internet in the end, but it did bring things back down to earth for a while.
