This text is taken from Courrier de l’ économique. Click here to subscribe.
Need to attract the spotlight when you arrive a little late to the party? Make like the big boss of the American bank JPMorgan Chase and make sure you are simply more extravagant than the others. For example: where everyone predicts the four-day work week, go further and already talk about the week… of three and a half days.
This is what Jamie Dimon did in a long interview given to the American financial channel Bloomberg TV at the beginning of October. The CEO of JPMorgan Chase said that thousands of his firm’s employees use artificial intelligence (AI) tools daily such as those embodied by ChatGPT, from OpenAI, or Bard, from Google. On this basis, he already believes not only that “this adds invaluable value to our business”, but also that workers will also see benefits from this technology.
Only, it won’t be right away. “Your children will live past 100 and never get cancer thanks to technology. And they will probably only work three and a half days a week,” promised Jamie Dimon. He also said he was sorry to see that AI was going to destroy certain types of jobs, but that that was normal because “that’s what technology has always done.”
The American businessman also spoke about the empty half of his glass: “Technology has done great things for humanity, but, you know, planes crash and medicines don’t have the hoped for effect. There is also some negative. »
Work less, work more
Just about everyone worth doing so publicly was already predicting the advent of the AI-driven four-day week. The CEO decided to go a little further in this prediction.
However, studies tend to demonstrate that the reality could be less radiant than what the big bosses let it seem. First, not all jobs are affected in the same way by new technology which, for the moment, is especially very adept at quickly processing information in the form of text or image. She doesn’t build houses. It does not produce electricity – rather the opposite.
In fact, according to the International Labor Organization (ILO), generative AI is most likely to impact the world’s advanced economies. In these countries, it could affect at most 5.5% of all jobs. In less wealthy countries, its effect may only be felt by 0.4% of workers. So it’s very little.
Obviously, nothing can predict which countries and which companies will decide to invest massively to amplify this effect within their workforce. But here again, the ILO has its own idea. According to her, most jobs that should be affected by the emergence of advanced artificial intelligence applications will only be partially affected. We will not replace workers, we will automate some of their tasks.
It is therefore not the employees who will disappear, but their tasks which will change. And what the ILO sees on the horizon is a world where workers have fewer tasks to do, but more supervision to do.
Because it will take someone to ensure that generative AI works as it should. And the result, especially if we don’t find a solution to the labor shortage, is that workers will have less onerous tasks to perform, but they will spend at least as much, if not more, time monitoring the automated systems around them.
In other words, they will work less… but they will work more.
Which, when you think about it, allows you to make whatever predictions you want. And if we ever come to adopt the three-day work week, remember you read it here first.