Bill Gates is an avid reader who, from time to time, recommends most interesting readings that have passed through their hands. In a recent entry on your blog Personally, the millionaire founder of Microsoft assured that everyone should read “their favorite book on AI”, which predicts the enormous impact that AI will have on the labor market and the way people work.
The book in question is titled ‘The coming wave: Technology, power and the great dilemma of the 21st century‘and he did not have to go far to look for his author, since he is Mustafa Suleymancurrent head of artificial intelligence at Microsoft and co-founder of Deepmind.
A prophetic reading on AI
“It’s the book I recommend more than any other on AI—to heads of state, business leaders, and anyone else who asks—because it offers something rare: a clear view of both the extraordinary opportunities and genuine risks that lie ahead. they wait,” Gates said in his review.
Suleyman’s book, written in 2023, predicted the changes that the development and implementation of AIas well as its integration in almost all industrial sectors. In the book it is mentioned a study from the consulting firm McKinsey in 2023 in which it was estimated that half of “work activities” will be automated from 2030.
The implications of the arrival of AI “will be enormously destabilizing for hundreds of millions of people who, at a minimum, will need to retrain and transition to new types of work,” Suleyman said in his book.
According to study forecasts ‘Jobs lost, jobs gained’ Elaborated by McKinsey, more than 400 million workers around the world will need to apply some type of transition in the performance of their job due to AI. This It does not mean that they will be replacedbut that AI will be integrated at some point in their production processes and they will have to learn to use the new tools.
However, the writer and CEO of Microsoft AI highlighted that, although in the first place these tools will only complement human work improving your productivity“it will fundamentally replace part of the workforce.”
Suleyman stated in his work that, to a greater or lesser extent, the AI-powered automation It will affect the vast majority of industrial sectors to a greater or lesser extent, in tasks such as administration, customer service and content creation. Something that, just two years later, we are already seeing reach some industrial segments.
The impact of AI on employment
The Microsoft AI CEO’s book describes how a small handful of jobs will remain outside of this automation because the AI will not be able to automate its functions. These are those sectors in which the human factor is decisive: craftsmen, electricians, plumbers, or those positions that require creative or critical thinking skills, something that, for the moment, remains out of reach of AI.
What the book points out as a certainty is that the vast majority of workers will need to expand their capabilities to learn to use AI tools, in the same way that a bricklayer learns to make cement or a lawyer knows the legal system. . They will be basic knowledge to carry out your work.
OK to what was published According to the consulting firm Gartner in May 2024, 39% of technology departments in companies in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany already had plans to train their employees in the use of AI, and 26% plan to do so in a future. period of six months. Gartner assured that, by 2028, one in four regrettable staff attrition will be due to managers’ lack of AI literacy.
The report’ Future of Jobs Report 2025‘ which has just been presented at the World Economic Forum in Davos, points out that AI will destroy some 92 million jobs, but will generate 170 million new jobs. That is, there will be a displacement of skills that will force many workers to specialize in the use of AI. The study estimates that around 1,090 million jobs will continue with small modifications that will not affect their performance.
In this sense, Suleyman’s forecasts coincide with the recently made by Sam Altmanrecognizing that the emergence of AI was going to cause many workers to be forced to move towards other new professions that currently they are still being defined.
Image | Flickr (Official Lula), Wikimedia Commons (Christopher Wilson)
