If AI Takes These Jobs, This Is What Society Looks Like

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Do you think the people building these AI companies believe that the outcome is going to be all good? It's going to be, it's going to serve everyone, it's going to be the age of abundance, everything's going to go well. Do you think they believe? These companies tell us that AI is going to benefit everyone and that's their mission. But you really start to see that rhetoric break down when you go to the places that look nothing like Silicon Valley. The jobs most exposed to AI like coding and accounting have seen a 13% drop in employment for workers under 25. We think 50% of entry-level jobs are going to be eliminated in the next five years. How many was that? How many was that right? 50%. Driving, I think, is one of the biggest employees in the world. We've got 9.5 million drivers or careers on our platform. Amazon announcing its largest job puts in years. Jobless stings in both the US and UK are plummeting. A focee here of one of those companies was to say, "We're not going to do this anymore. They would just be replaced." Because the investors are putting their money up because they want to create AI and read the benefits of it. You can imagine the majority of our trips being fulfilled by robots probably not 10 years from now. But you go 15, 20 years from now, you're going to start getting there. What do the 9 million people do? I don't know. What are the occupations that you genuinely believe won't exist five years from now, as we knew them? People say lawyers are going to be disrupted. Well, I recently had a legal case that I had to resolve. It was going to cost us £50,000, so $60,000, as a start the process with a law firm. We took matters into our own hands and we used Claude and we actually fixed the process and resolved the process by spending $20 a month. $20 a month. Claude gave us a coaching session on how to handle it. Gave us multiple decision-tree pathways. Gave us the documents that we would need, gave us an Excel spreadsheet of, do say this, don't say this in the negotiation and it made me realise my goodness what a lawyer is going to do because if all they do is charge for time for money to regurgitate contracts, I don't need that anymore. Multiple reports say legacy legal tech and data firms have lost roughly 20% of their value so far in 2026. $280 billion was wiped off the value of publicly traded companies like that in the last week. Like it's wild because we're not going to need that. I don't believe we're going to need these business models as they currently stand. I think they're going to have to change and adapt. I think a lawyer needs to take a completely different shape. Part business coach, part lawyer, part prompt engineer. They're going to be the key person of AI in the room who the lawyers job will be to work with you on your AI prompting and help you get the resolution. You're probably going to need a lot less of a lawyer's time. Your colour work has been devalued and we've seen people who work with their hands and people who turn up to your house and fix your house in a devalued role. It could be in the next couple of years these are the roles that are elevated the most and that plumbers regularly earn more than lawyers. It is really this human thing. I don't know if machines will have these things in the future but for certain we do and there will be jobs where we want to have people. If I'm in a hospital, I want a human being to hold my hand while I'm anxious or in pain. The human touch is going to, I think, take more and more value as the other skills become more and more automated. At some point I think what remains is actually the IRL irreplaceably human stuff, human to human. Our mazlovian needs of being in person like we are now aren't going to change. We need connection. Humans get very sick when they don't have other human beings in their life and strong deep relationships. So that stuff is going to matter a whole lot. I have this contrarian we take that actually maybe this is the first technology that's going to deliver on the promise of making us human and connected because we're going to be rendered useless at everything else other than what humans are good at. Because all the other technology said oh we're going to make you more connected, connecting the world and they disconnected the world and isolated the world but maybe this is the one it's so intelligent now that it doesn't need us to ground in spreadsheets anymore. Do you see that actually happening in real time right now that it's making us more able to be in person connected with one other, having deeper social community engagements and so on. Yes. I'll give you some data points. Okay. Data point number one. The financial time is released to report on social media usage and what they saw is 2022 is the peak and it's plateaued ever since. The generation that's plateaued the fastest and heading down is the younger generations. The boomer is still off to the races right on Facebook and stuff and then you look at the way Jen Alphari using social media they're not posting as much. They call it posting zero. They're scrolling sometimes but they're in dark social environments like WhatsApp and Snapchat and I message. They're not like performing to the world. They also value IRL experience as much more than any other generation. They're like not getting smashed. We're seeing every brand has a run club and we're seeing this real sort of sort of almost like innate realization that like technology led us down at some fundamental level. Like dating apps led us down, social networking kind of has led us down and we're seeing I think maybe a biification of society where a lot of people are going back this like I want to go back to what it is to be a human. I was looking at the top 10 jobs according to AI that I'm most likely to be disrupted and it's had things like drivers with making to be 30% of them will be automated by 2030 customer service, representative and call center reps which I used to be. - Uh-huh. - 50% head count reductions after AI roll out according to some estimates. Some up go up to about 80% actually saw a tour on my timeline yesterday that is real human voice indistinguishable from humans. It's just launched and it's causing a huge stir so that they're thinking that will replace even more of the customer service roles. I did speak to the sea of Klanah. Tailed the IRS, he said we currently have 7,000 employees. We're going to be able to get down to 3000. He said after summer because of AI and we'll be using our existing team members that are in customer service roles to do more sort of bespoke white glove VIP stuff. - We'll go up in fact Evelyn's paradox would suggest that a lot of the dehumanizing repetitive work will go away. But actually if there are AI bots that are really good at setting appointments for a VIP human person to have a conversation then that work will go through the roof because one of the reasons that people like right now most companies wish they could have more VIP conversations but the appointment setting they don't have a lot of the low level appointment setting stuff happening. And if the appointment setting stuff, if the cost of that goes to zero then the affordability of the VIP level treatment becomes, you know becomes much more feasible. - Retail cashers, admin assistants, bookkeepers and payroll clerks, sales, development reps, warehouse workers with Amazon and others reporting that robots now assist or replace labor in a roughly 40% of fulfillment tasks and that Boston Dynamics video which I'll put up on the screen shows a humanoid robot working in a factory. - What's nice about some of this is that many of the jobs here are jobs that a lot of people don't actually like doing. They are repetitive and dehumanizing, they're late night, they're early mornings so potentially provided there is a jevelance paradox that something happens that's more fun, more humanizing, more interesting, more VIP, more chaotic and you know all of that sort of stuff. It could be a very positive thing. - But people also want human experiences. So it's not actually just about the capabilities of the models. It's also about what people want, like some things they would turn to AI for and some things they wouldn't irrespective of whether or not AI is capable of doing it. But because of a preference that they want human to human interaction. And so what we're seeing right now is the thing that happens with every wave of automation which is that there is a bunch of entry-level work that gets automated away. And there are also new jobs created but the jobs that are created are in one of two categories. categories. There are people that get even higher skilled jobs. And what he was saying, like we pay people more for like the handcrafted code now. And there's also the people who get way worse jobs. And so there was this amazing article in New York magazine that was talking about how a lot of people are getting laid off. And then they end up working in data annotation, which is the labor that I've been referring to throughout this conversation that companies need in order to teach their models the next thing that the companies are trying to automate. And so like a marketer gets laid off and then they go and work for a data annotation firm to train the models on the very job that they were just laid off in, which will then perpetuate more layoffs if that model then develops that skill. And the article was talking about how this has become a huge catch all for a lot of people that are struggling with finding job opportunities right now, including like award-winning directors and Hollywood that are actually secretly doing this data annotation work to put food on the table. And so when they talk about there's going to be mass unemployment and then there's going to be some new jobs created that we can't even imagine. I think a lot of these narratives rarely talk about the jobs, a lot of the jobs that are created are way worse than the jobs that were there. And it breaks the career ladder. So it's the entry level and the mid-tier jobs that get gouged out. It's higher order jobs and then way more lower order jobs that get created. And so how do people continue to progress in their careers? There's no more rungs on the ladder. Now driving I think is one of the biggest employees in the world, like as of profession. I mean we've got nine and a half million drivers and careers on our platform. We are the largest organizer of flexible work around the world and I think the second largest workforce is a Chinese army. Wow. Yeah. It's a big group of folks that we've organized. And statistically there's less accidents in an autonomous Tesla than there is if a human drives it. So it's safer for my car to drive it self statistically than for me to drive it. That's true, right? That autonomous driving is currently safer. Those nine million drivers careers that you have will be out of work conceivably. And you know talking about being honest about this situation. Yeah. I think again it goes to physical AI as well, right? So I think 20 years from now you can imagine that those nine million will be 20 million AVs maybe. But we have time between now and then. Partially because we don't operate in the virtual world, right? We operate in the physical world. You have to get the regulations up, you have to build the cars, you have to build the sensor stacks, the models have to get there. So there is time between now and then. But you can imagine the majority of our trips being fulfilled by robots of some kind. Probably not 10 years from now. But you go 15, 20 years from now you're going to start getting there. What do the nine million people do? I don't know. Now we are expanding the kind of work that's available on the platform. Partially as a result of it, right? We used to be the only work is driving. Now there's delivering. You can have shoppers as well. I think it'll be a little while at least before you get AI shoppers. And now actually we have a team called Uber AI Solutions that allows people to train these same agents and train AI agents and AI models and do all kinds of knowledge-based work on their phone as well to kind of extend the kind of work that we offer humans on our platform and different opportunities for them to to make money. So we are extending the platform and then the question is how much of the platform gets automated and what's the velocity at which we can extend our platform into other kinds of work versus the velocity of automation. I can't tell you which is going to go faster. Hand on heart though, it does appear that unemployment is going to be significantly increased in a world of AI especially. We just imagine this sort of continual rate of improvement. I just can't. You would have to. Unless again, historically in society's new kinds of jobs have come up. Knowledge jobs, physical jobs. Yeah, I mean now we've disrupted both. That's why there's a question here and I do think there's a real question as to the ability of societies to retrain the abilities of human beings to retrain themselves. AI is going to be a part of that but the timing there, how fast is it going to go? It's a real question mark. I think you're absolutely right. I don't think it's going to be a big issue, big issue in the next five years but when you go five plus years it's going to become more of an issue for society large. The question of well if everything goes right, we create AI, we figure out how to make it safe, we achieve all these economic miracles. Then you face a problem and this is not a new problem. So John Maynard Keynes who was a famous economist in the early part of the 20th century wrote a paper in 1930. So this is in the depths of the depression. It's called on the economic problems of our grandchildren. He predicts that at some point science will deliver sufficient wealth that no one will have to work ever again and then man will be faced with his true eternal problem. How to live, I don't remember exactly but how to live wisely and well when the economic incentives, the economic constraints are lifted. We don't have an answer to that question. So AI systems are doing pretty much everything we currently call work. Anything you might aspire to, you want to become a surgeon, it takes the robot seven seconds to learn how to be a surgeon that's better than any human being. Elon said last week that the humanoid robots will be 10 times better than any surgeon that's have lived quite possibly. Yeah. Well and they'll also have hands that are a millimeter in size, so they can go inside and do all kinds of things that humans can't do. And I think we need to put serious effort into this question. What is a world where AI can do all forms of human work that you would want your children to live in? What does that world look like? Tell me the destination so that we can develop a transition plan to get there. And I've asked AI researchers, economists, science fiction writers, futurists, no one has been able to describe that world.