Artificial intelligence could make many jobs like cashiers and drivers obsolete – leading to widespread social unrest, according to a senior Wall Street financial executive.
Armen Panossian, a co-CEO of Los Angeles-based investment firm Oaktree Capital Management, told Bloomberg News that AI poses “the greatest risk” because while it “clearly has the potential for very large economic benefits,” it also there will be “social impacts.”
“Millions of people could be out of work. So who will retrain those people? Panossian told Bloomberg News.
“If we don’t understand this, there could be social unrest.”
Panossian said continuing to ignore the risks will result in “a bill to pay in terms of employment and in terms of people who rely on paycheck to paycheck jobs who will find themselves untrained and unprepared for the new economy.”
“And we will be forced as a society to either have social unrest or have a welfare state,” he added.
His sentiments echo dire predictions that were included in reports and studies compiled by academics and experts who sought to assess the impact of AI on the future job market.
Last year, Goldman Sachs warned generative AI – which is trained on various datasets to learn pattern recognition – could affect up to 300 million full-time jobs worldwide.
In 2020, the World Economic Forum published a study which said that AI, automation and other technologies could lead to the displacement of up to 85 million jobs worldwide by 2025.
A 2017 report by consulting firm McKinsey estimated that up to 800 million jobs worldwide could be automated by 2030 – resulting in somewhere between 400 million and 800 million people having to change jobs or acquire new skills .
“The danger is if we don’t do something about it now to retrain some of these people or prepare for a post-AI employment landscape, we’re going to have problems with a deepening divide between the haves and the have-nots, the haves . and people from paycheck to paycheck,” Panossian said.
“And that’s going to mean a significant amount of damage to a lot of people who don’t expect it to come their way.”
He also warned investors who are currently bullish on AI stocks that the asset may be overvalued and that the market may be rife with speculation — likening it to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and early 1990s. 2000.
Panossian said that while “the gains are clear in terms of their potential, their timing is improbable.”
“And if that takes much longer than investors expect, I would expect to see a pretty violent reset in valuations and potentially some losses for investors along the way.”
Panossian warned investors “not to jump on our skis and get too exposed or too focused on AI because we remember what it was like when the fiber optic boom was happening.”
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