A NEW report has found that 74 percent of Indian employees are worried that AI will take their jobs.
The findings, published by Microsoft as part of its 2023 Work Trend Index, surveyed 31,000 people across industries in 31 countries.
1
“The platform shift to AI is underway and will completely transform the way people work,” the report reads.
“And for many, the fix can’t come soon enough. The pace of work has increased exponentially—along with the crush of data, information, and always-on communications.”
But in India, three in four Indian employees are concerned with artificial intelligence (AI) taking over their roles.
However, 83 percent said that they would give AI as much work as possible to lessen their own workload.
Meanwhile, 100 percent of Indian creative workers who are familiar with AI said they would be content using AI for creative aspects of their job.
“This new generation of AI will remove the drudgery of work and unleash creativity,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft.
“There’s an enormous opportunity for AI-powered tools to help alleviate digital debt, build AI aptitude, and empower employees.”
Overall, Microsoft’s report showed that workers are enthusiastic about AI in the workplace despite some being concerned about their jobs.
Most read in News Tech
However, many experts – including Professor Yoshua Bengio, one of the “godfathers” of AI – are growing increasingly worried about the technology being abused.
Bengio, who teaches at Université de Montréal, even went as far as telling the BBC that militaries shouldn’t be able to use AI.
The professor cited the recent evolution of OpenAI’s ChatGPT as an example of rapidly growing, sophisticated AI.
“We have reached a level of intelligence of these systems, with ChatGPT last November, which corresponds to essentially being able to pass for human,” Bengio said in an interview.
ChatGPT is a natural language chatbot that can answer prompts, write essays, and even generate complex code in seconds – Google’s Bard program works in a similar way.
And the technology can be used by bad actors to bring disinformation to the masses or to even destabilize democracy, Bengio warned.
“There’s already information suggesting that countries have been trying to influence our [elections],” he said.
“Countries have already been using trolls to try to influence people, but behind each troll account, there’s a human. Now, if we can do the same kind of thing with a machine, then your 100 trolls can control millions of accounts,” he added.
Bengio is not the only industry leader to voice his concerns over AI and its future implications on society.
Twitter and Tesla owner Elon Musk has long voiced his concerns over AI.
In an interview with Fox News in April, Musk warned that AI could lead to “civilization destruction.”
