- AI's impact on jobs discussed by NDTV's Rahul Kanwal and ex-PM Rishi Sunak at AI Summit
- Dario Amodei warned AI could disrupt over half of white-collar jobs soon, per Kanwal
- Sunak viewed AI effects through historical tech disruption, citing Excel's impact on accounting
At the NDTV AI Summit, a discussion on the future of artificial intelligence and jobs took place between Rahul Kanwal, Editor-in-Chief of NDTV, and Rishi Sunak, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The conversation highlighted contrasting views on whether AI will cause mass displacement or follow the historical pattern of technological disruption creating new opportunities, with Sunak predicting that "today and tomorrow's 20 year olds will be managing AI agents to help them accomplish their work."
EIC, Kanwal pointed to comments made by Dario Amodei at World Economic Forum in Davos, warning that the scale and speed of AI adoption could dramatically reshape white-collar work. "Because you're saying some jobs will be impacted. I heard Dario at Davos where he made the point that more than half the white collar jobs, anybody who's working on a computer or working with tech, a lot of the code that they're currently writing," Kanwal said, adding that similar trends are visible at Anthropic.
He further added, leaders at the AI firm have acknowledged a sharp shift in how work is being done. "That's happening at Anthropic as well where he's constantly saying that we're not writing as much code as we need to do, so it's not some jobs," he said. "This could be mass displacement potentially of a kind we haven't seen and this isn't necessarily several years out into the future. According to Anthropic, this could happen in a couple of years."
Responding to these concerns, former PM Sunak offered a more historical perspective. "If you look back at history, I think the conversation that we just had, what you just said, you could probably find someone saying something very similar at multiple points in our history when some new technological revolution came along," he said.
Sunak cited the example of spreadsheet software. "When Excel first came out, everyone thought that would be the end of accountants," he noted, referencing Microsoft Excel. "So Excel didn't do away with accountants or bookkeepers, it just created probably many more things for them to do."
He also referenced research from Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggesting that technological change historically creates new roles that were previously unimaginable. "They've looked at all the jobs that are in existence today and have concluded that around 60 per cent or so didn't exist half a century ago," Sunak said. "History would tell you that technology has been able to create new jobs over time as we discover new things to do."
Still, Sunak acknowledged that AI may present unique challenges. "Now some of the most dangerous words in the English language are, this time it's different," he said. "But there are credible people who think it might be different this time because of the wide ranging application of AI."