The World Economic Forum has predicted that 83 million jobs will disappear within the next five years as artificial intelligence (AI) takes over roles like clerks, cashiers, and secretaries.
The prediction comes as IBM announced plans to automate 7,800 back-office jobs over the next five years.
Saadia Zahidi, the research group’s managing director, said AI would soon replace jobs performed by humans.
Roles at risk of being replaced by AI include:
Bank tellers
Postal clerks
Cashiers
Ticket sellers
Data entry teams
Secretaries
Stock-keeping clerks
Accounting
Bookkeeping
Payroll clerks
The fastest growing jobs are for specialists in AI, machine learning, and sustainability, analysts of data, business intelligence, information security, and fintech and robotics engineers.
Researchers at the World Economic Forum said the lost jobs are being wiped out by automation, digitization, and the rise of AI systems, including chatbots like ChatGPT, as well as soaring inflation and slower economic growth.
The news comes as big tech companies like Facebook and Amazon have been announcing massive layoffs since the end of last year.
As The Daily Fetched reported last year, World Economic Forum lead advisor and Klaus Schwab’s right-hand man, Yuval Noah Harari, predicted humans would soon be rendered economically and militarily “redundant.”
“We just don’t need the vast majority of the population,” he said during an interview with Chris Anderson, the head of TED.
Harari also said that people would need to “let go” of the human experience and embrace a virtual reality world where they would need to relearn how to see and walk.
“Maybe the most important quality to survive and flourish in the 21st century is to have mental flexibility — not just to keep learning and changing again and again — [but] also to keep letting go,” Harari said.
“Part of what makes it difficult to learn new things [is] that we hold on. I’ll give an example of how deep it goes: it’s not just what you learned in college or what you learned in kindergarten; it’s even what you learned as a baby, as a toddler, like learning how to see or learning how to walk,” he added.