The Great Job Wipeout: AI Set to Crush 300M Careers - report from Goldman Sacks

[ShrimaanJi]

Hi All,

I would like to hear your take on this report from Goldman Sacks. What will the fate of the IT industry as India is CLEARLY lagging behind in AI let alone AI innovations be? The IT industry in India is solely/mostly dependent on coding jobs mostly maintenance or patch work aka "Software Development" (FANCY word for coding. Another fancy word for coding is Software Engineering. Yeah right - software engineering. My foot) jobs.

The Great Job Wipeout: AI Set to Crush 300M Careers
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/th ... ngNewsSerp

Artificial intelligence threatens to eliminate or degrade 300 million jobs across the U.S. and Europe, according to Goldman Sachs' latest report. From lawyers to artists, white-collar workers face unprecedented career disruption as AI capabilities expand and reshape the global workforce.

[Returning_Indian]

In the short term, India may benefit from AI development as there is a growing demand for people to train models, a task that can be done remotely. However, in the long run, widespread job losses seem inevitable as these models become more refined. Future job opportunities will likely come from deploying large language models (LLMs) in various sectors.

In healthcare, for example, LLMs can be trained on organizational data to enhance efficiency. A hospital or university system could deploy AI agents like ChatGPT at different levels to streamline operations. Currently, a patient’s journey through the healthcare system—evaluation by a nurse, diagnosis by a doctor, admission, treatment, and discharge—involves significant administrative work. This includes paperwork for nurses, doctors, billing, insurance claims, and record-keeping. AI has the potential to automate many of these tasks, improving efficiency. Properly trained models could also interface with medical devices, reducing manual data entry, aiding decision-making, and minimizing errors. Administrative roles involving data entry, billing, and insurance approvals are particularly susceptible to automation. Today, nurses and doctors often spend more time navigating electronic health record systems like Cerner than interacting with patients—AI could help shift this balance, reducing wait times and improving care quality. While real-time applications in healthcare are still emerging, significant advancements are likely within the next five years.

The integration of robotics into healthcare remains uncertain. While full automation of complex tasks is likely decades away—given that robots are still struggling with simple tasks like folding a T-shirt—more routine jobs, such as janitorial work, could be at risk sooner. However, highly specialized tasks like inserting a Foley catheter are still beyond robotic capabilities.

In other industries such as banking, finance, sales, marketing, advertising, education, customer service, journalism, software engineering etc disruption has already begun. AI-driven automation has resulted in job losses and prevented new job creation, especially in roles reliant on standardized data. Western markets, where data is already well-structured, have found it easier to implement AI-driven automation. This puts outsourcing industries, particularly in countries like India and the Philippines, at risk. Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) centers will likely see significant losses in the near future, and those in the outsourcing sector will need to adapt. However, current LLMs have limitations—primarily accuracy issues due to their reliance on non-standardized data. If Chinese innovations in AI make LLM design more affordable and efficient, industries may shift toward standardized, domain-specific models to improve accuracy, rather than depending on existing, often unreliable AI models.

For India’s domestic market, AI is unlikely to cause major disruptions anytime soon. The lack of standardized data makes large-scale AI deployment difficult. Outside Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities, financial transactions like loans are still managed on paper, with little to no digital records. While AI may influence sectors like advertising, the low cost of human labor in India makes widespread automation less economically viable.

PS: while these are my original thoughts, chatgpt was used to reword and improve sentence framing. As you can see there is just a different way chatgpt writes. I think there is desperate need of some change in the way it writes.

[JINSAKAI]

Hi All,

I would like to hear your take on this report from Goldman Sacks. What will the fate of the IT industry as India is CLEARLY lagging behind in AI let alone AI innovations be? The IT industry in India is solely/mostly dependent on coding jobs mostly maintenance or patch work aka "Software Development" (FANCY word for coding. Another fancy word for coding is Software Engineering. Yeah right - software engineering. My foot) jobs.

The Great Job Wipeout: AI Set to Crush 300M Careers
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/th ... ngNewsSerp

Artificial intelligence threatens to eliminate or degrade 300 million jobs across the U.S. and Europe, according to Goldman Sachs' latest report. From lawyers to artists, white-collar workers face unprecedented career disruption as AI capabilities expand and reshape the global workforce.

I don’t think AI will replace any Software Engineering job in near future, maybe junior / mid level Software Engineers may be more productive with of the Code Assistant tools, and those getting paid almost half a mill should be safe

[Returning_Indian]

I don’t think AI will replace any Software Engineering job in near future, maybe junior / mid level Software Engineers may be more productive with of the Code Assistant tools, and those paying almost half a mill should be safe

whenever someone says more productive, I always read it as a job loss. I think we are underestimating the number of new jobs that will not be created because of these tools already. If software engineer can improve their efficiency by 50% then that's reduction of half the workforce directly. That's millions of people.

Internet drastically improved communication in last two decades. It resulted in lot more production and consumption and gdp increased dramatically worldwide. It resulted in improvement in quality of life for billions. Will AI result in any such revolution?

[JINSAKAI]

I don’t think AI will replace any Software Engineering job in near future, maybe junior / mid level Software Engineers may be more productive with of the Code Assistant tools, and those paying almost half a mill should be safe

whenever someone says more productive, I always read it as a job loss. I think we are underestimating the number of new jobs that will not be created because of these tools already. If software engineer can improve their efficiency by 50% then that's reduction of half the workforce directly. That's millions of people.

Internet drastically improved communication in last two decades. It resulted in lot more production and consumption and gdp increased dramatically worldwide. It resulted in improvement in quality of life for billions. Will AI result in any such revolution?

True, Mark Zuckerberg maintained about Coders will replace AI just last week. Not sure if that's so easy based on my limited exposure to Code AI tool.

https://www.inc.com/kit-eaton/mark-zuck ... y/91140118

[wd40]

People under estimate the human inertia factor. It is not that companies are waiting for AI to come and improve their efficiencies. Already within software development/support there is atleast 50-75% inefficieny and everyone knows it. Elon musk came and wiped out 75% of Twitter and it is still running fine. This can be done "NOW" in every big organization and there will be no impact on the output. In my own bank our team has about 40 people, the entire work can be done with 5-10 people if they focus and work 40 hours a week and rest can be fired, the output is likely to improve rather than go down.

So AI will come and take away our jobs? okay

[SAPPORO]

No matter what happens, US residents/citizens would be safe. Remember Trump got elected to Make America Great Again to the time when the high school education was enough to have a decent living, and Dems have also railed against the need for college education and have in addition floated the idea of Universal Basic Income. Not requiring college education is one of the very few things that both parties agree on. Maybe since Republicans don't like the term UBI, they would implement it in a different form and start the employment guarantee schemes as it's done in India.

[r2somewhere]

Hi All,

I would like to hear your take on this report from Goldman Sacks. What will the fate of the IT industry as India is CLEARLY lagging behind in AI let alone AI innovations be? The IT industry in India is solely/mostly dependent on coding jobs mostly maintenance or patch work aka "Software Development" (FANCY word for coding. Another fancy word for coding is Software Engineering. Yeah right - software engineering. My foot) jobs.

The Great Job Wipeout: AI Set to Crush 300M Careers
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/th ... ngNewsSerp

Artificial intelligence threatens to eliminate or degrade 300 million jobs across the U.S. and Europe, according to Goldman Sachs' latest report. From lawyers to artists, white-collar workers face unprecedented career disruption as AI capabilities expand and reshape the global workforce.

I don’t think AI will replace any Software Engineering job in near future, maybe junior / mid level Software Engineers may be more productive with of the Code Assistant tools, and those getting paid almost half a mill should be safe

My last company did layoffs because of AI. Not because AI is writing the code now. But because AI has made a lot of code redundant. Instead of having to write complex data pipelines and business logic, the company directly exposes the database to OpenAI's API and the latter spits out the results instantly. No need to write business logic in code anymore.

[wd40]

Hi All,

I would like to hear your take on this report from Goldman Sacks. What will the fate of the IT industry as India is CLEARLY lagging behind in AI let alone AI innovations be? The IT industry in India is solely/mostly dependent on coding jobs mostly maintenance or patch work aka "Software Development" (FANCY word for coding. Another fancy word for coding is Software Engineering. Yeah right - software engineering. My foot) jobs.

The Great Job Wipeout: AI Set to Crush 300M Careers
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/th ... ngNewsSerp

Artificial intelligence threatens to eliminate or degrade 300 million jobs across the U.S. and Europe, according to Goldman Sachs' latest report. From lawyers to artists, white-collar workers face unprecedented career disruption as AI capabilities expand and reshape the global workforce.

I don’t think AI will replace any Software Engineering job in near future, maybe junior / mid level Software Engineers may be more productive with of the Code Assistant tools, and those getting paid almost half a mill should be safe

My last company did layoffs because of AI. Not because AI is writing the code now. But because AI has made a lot of code redundant. Instead of having to write complex data pipelines and business logic, the company directly exposes the database to OpenAI's API and the latter spits out the results instantly. No need to write business logic in code anymore.

I guess it is a small software/product company, I would never work in such a company. I work with directly the end customer's in-house IT, like banks, retail, FMCG, telecom etc. Their IT is mostly cost centre.

[r2somewhere]

I don’t think AI will replace any Software Engineering job in near future, maybe junior / mid level Software Engineers may be more productive with of the Code Assistant tools, and those getting paid almost half a mill should be safe

My last company did layoffs because of AI. Not because AI is writing the code now. But because AI has made a lot of code redundant. Instead of having to write complex data pipelines and business logic, the company directly exposes the database to OpenAI's API and the latter spits out the results instantly. No need to write business logic in code anymore.

I guess it is a small software/product company, I would never work in such a company. I work with directly the end customer's in-house IT, like banks, retail, FMCG, telecom etc. Their IT is mostly cost centre.

Its a Fortune 500 insurance company.