A recently released Goldman Sachs report fears that 300 million jobs could be affected globally by artificial intelligence platforms like ChatGPT. Analysts at the financial major expect 18 per cent of global jobs to be automated, with advanced economies like the US and Eurozone facing the most severe consequences.

The Goldman Sachs report states that generative AI platforms are likely to cause significant disruption for the labour market. As close to two-thirds of jobs in the EU and US, ‘are exposed to some degree of AI automation,’ they could be impacted immediately. Overall, white-collar jobs are more likely to get automated compared to manual labour.

The report says that jobs that involve manual labour will be least impacted. As many as 46 per cent tasks could be automated in administrative support jobs, followed by 44 per cent for legal work and 37 per cent in tasks related to legal and engineering. As many as 36 per cent of positions in physical, life, and social sciences and 35 per cent in business and financial operations can be automated.

As per Goldman Sachs report, Hong Kong, Israel, Japan, Sweden and the US are likely to be most affected. But jobs in China, Nigeria, Vietnam, Kenya and India are least likely to be affected by automation.

The silver lining is that even though the advancements in AI are likely to cut administrative jobs in the short term, the report notes that it could also aid in current jobs by freeing up the workload of US workers by 25 per cent to 50 per cent and allow people to be more productive in other areas.

Within the next 10 years, Goldman Sachs economists predict that labour productivity will increase, and as per their estimates AI could increase annual global GDP by seven per cent.

The report finds resonance in an open letter written by Elon Musk and a group of AI experts and industry executives which states that generative AI poses potential risks to society. Elon Musk was one of the original co-founders of OpenAI before quitting the board in 2018.

The letter, issued by the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit organisation funded by the Musk Foundation, said: ‘Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.’

‘Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders.’ The signatories appealed – ‘We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 (including the currently-being-trained GPT-5).’

The letter, posted online on March 28, 2023 is signed by more than 1,100 people, including Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Yoshua Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal considered one of the ‘Godfathers of modern AI’, historian Yuval Noah Harari, Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn and Tristan Harris of the Center for Humane Technology.