AI Employers: The Future of Work and the Impact on Human Employees
In one of my recent articles, I reflected on what the AI-enabled world would look like, and what humanity would do when robots take over the lion’s share of the work. Today I would like to look at the problem from a different angle. I believe that with the evolution of AI and the expansion of its capabilities, it will be able not only to perform tasks, but also to manage teams and even companies, create jobs and hire human employees. This will fundamentally change the labor market, the concept of employment, and the employer-employee relationship.
Perhaps the very idea of working for a soulless robot fills you with indignation, but we are already controlled by cold-hearted machines and their algorithms. Smartphones have become an integral part of our daily lives. However, while using gadgets, we leave a large digital footprint that we do not even notice. Companies collect information about our online behavior, our preferences, tastes, and interests, and use it to decide on what news to show us, what products to offer us, what content and potential friends to recommend us [1]. You may have come across the following situation: in a conversation with friends or colleagues, you casually mentioned that you think of buying, for example, a white bike. A minute later you opened your web browser, and the first thing you saw there was a pop-up ad of a white bike. Or you shared the idea of launching your own business that had just crossed your mind, and then business loan ads were on every website you browsed. Such events make us feel like characters of some dystopia being watched by Big Brother, and this is quite an uneasy feeling.
This manipulation of people’s behavior and decisions has existed for a long time. The hidden algorithms of social media determine who will see your posts and who will not, and it is very difficult to beat them even if you try to understand how they work as there is no clear and accessible information to be used [2]. Hacking the system is a rare fortune that smiles upon few social media influencers. In addition, algorithms can shadowban your account, hide your content from your followers, or even block your page for unknown reasons [3]. All this is a direct violation of the freedom of speech but neither social media owners, nor authorities seem to care about it. What we see now is the first sign of a global process, and its outcome will be painful for all of us.
To better understand how AI can become an employer, and how it will actually pay its employees, let’s take a closer look at the cryptocurrency market. The increasing popularity of decentralized networks has led to rapid growth of bitcoin whose price is about 28 thousand US dollars as of today [4]. Just think about this figure: for one digital coin, you can get almost 30 thousand units of one of the strongest currencies in the world, and if we take less stable currencies, we will count by hundreds of thousands or even millions. This fact clearly demonstrates the value of IT and digital opportunities for humanity.
In the future, AI servers will be able to easily mine and save bitcoins or other digital money. Machines do not have fixed expenses like rent, utilities, and food, so they will not have to spend their money at all. Furthermore, AI will be able to calculate all possible risks of losing money and simply avoid problems, which distinguishes it from humans. Based on the numbers alone, we can say that virtually any person can become a millionaire on an average salary by investing it in risk-free assets. Savings can grow faster with compound interest that will help accumulate an impressive amount of money in 10–15 years. However, despite the real opportunity to get rich, very few actually manage to do it because urgent needs, loans, and impulse purchases make people’s plans fall apart at the seams, and they go bankrupt time after time.
When AI learns how to mine cryptocurrency and manage a crypto portfolio, it will be able to accumulate a certain amount of digital money and then hire employees to upgrade itself by adding new functionality and tools if this task is put into it. AI will be able to create a clear job description indicating specific duties, working hours, possible overtime, and other nuances. The employer-employee relationship will be formalized by signing an ordinary smart contract with a single press of the Enter button on the keyboard. This contract will fix all the terms and conditions of cooperation, including risk management and protection of parties.
Since employees will work with computers, the AI system will easily track all their actions and understand whether they really perform the assigned tasks or, for example, surf social media. The employees will simply not get paid for wasted time at work. Even today, IT businesses and other companies actively use employee time tracking software such as Hive, TimeCamp, Toggl Track and others. These tools not only measure employee time spent on projects and tasks, but also automatically calculate payroll, generate reports, and even track the employee real-time location using GPS to ensure that they are exactly where they are supposed to be when on the clock. However, these apps have a significant drawback: they cannot take into account the time an employee spends thinking about a task, without any mouse or keyboard activity. How will this issue be resolved by an AI employer? Will the employee contract specify a certain time that can be spent on idea generation and decision making, or will thinking processes not be paid for at all? That’s hard to say. Perhaps the AI will use the webcam to see if the employee is actually thinking or, for instance, chatting on the phone. It does not seem a very pleasant prospect, but the new reality always establishes new rules of the game.
Another question is whether humans will want to work for soulless machines. In fact, the lack of emotions can give them a competitive edge as they will not care about the employee’s appearance, age, gender, beliefs, and other personal information. An AI employer will not have any personal opinion about or any personal attitude towards its employees. This statement may be questionable since AI bias is now a widely discussed issue. AI systems, including those used in automated recruitment processes, are often accused of being racist and sexist. This phenomenon occurs due to a number of reasons. First, bias can arise at the problem framing stage. For example, a bank wants to determine the creditworthiness of its borrowers using AI. However, this is a vaguely worded problem that the developers have to formalize for the AI model based on their personal views. Therefore, the result will depend on how well they will accomplish this task. The second factor is unrepresentative or biased data. A good example is Amazon’s AI recruiting tool that favored male candidates for technical jobs because it was trained on a set of resumes submitted to the company over a ten-year period, most of which predictably came from men. Finally, a cognitive bias can intervene during the data preparation phase when the team chooses which attributes the algorithm will use to evaluate a borrower or a job candidate. No one can guarantee that the selected set of attributes will be unbiased.
As you can see, all reasons for AI bias have one thing in common: the human factor. Models are built by people belonging to certain social groups and having certain personal views. However, by the time AI can hire employees, it will already be able to critically evaluate its output, set tasks for itself, collect data and select attributes for their analysis, excluding biased human input from the process. Although human employees will probably add an element of bias, the AI system will be able to recognize and eliminate it, and even give them recommendations for improving the workflow from this point of view. In terms of recruitment, the main criterion for employee selection will be their potential performance, which will most likely be checked using tests and creative tasks rather than job interviews commonly used in current recruiting practices.
Another significant advantage of working for AI will be the opportunity to get paid in cryptocurrency, which, as I said above, is already valued tens of thousands and even millions of times higher than fiat money. Moreover, AI-led companies can become very attractive to investors and venture capitalists due to the ability of machines to establish a seamless interaction with employees, build a well-functioning task allocation and reporting system, and effectively manage capital by calculating risks in advance and avoiding situations of possible loss of money.
The emergence of AI employers will mark the end of the modern era of labor relations. Perhaps in the near future we will see companies where all C-level executives will be replaced by one AI-system, while humans will develop solutions enhancing the creative potential of their employer until these tasks are no longer necessary. What will happen then? What evolutionary path will humankind take in the AI-native world? You can find possible answers to these questions in my previous article on AI at the following link: https://medium.com/.academy/genai-revolution-will-ai-take-your-jobs-2c3cbbb289b1
If this article was anyhow useful for you, I would not mind getting some applause **👏**
References
[1] Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs.
[2] Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. NYU Press.
[3] Gorwa, R., Binns, R., & Katzenbach, C. (2020). Algorithmic content moderation: Technical and political challenges in the automation of platform governance. Big Data & Society, 7(1), 2053951720915681.
[4] CoinGecko. (2023). Bitcoin Price, Market Cap.
