JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon is shaking off doomsday predictions about what AI means for humanity—as a substitute laying out how he sees the expertise vastly enhancing companies and the work-life steadiness of their workers.
Even Dimon—a fierce advocate of long-established profession norms corresponding to working laborious, being ready for something and dealing within the workplace—says future generations of workers may work a day and a half much less each week, because of AI.
In addition to the working week shrinking from 5 to 3 and a half days per week, Dimon additionally predicts that workers sooner or later may reside to 100 years of age.
Hundreds of individuals at America’s greatest financial institution are already utilizing the expertise, Dimon informed Bloomberg TV, including that synthetic intelligence is a “living breathing thing” that may shift over the course of historical past.
The expertise could also be utilized by JPMorgan for an enormous vary of areas—errors, buying and selling, analysis, and hedging to call a couple of—arguably illustrating fears that AI will take the roles of human counterparts.
Goldman Sachs predicts that roughly 300 million jobs can be misplaced to the expertise, with round a quarter of the American workforce fearing sooner or later they are going to lose their roles to synthetic intelligence.
However the advance of expertise can be one thing societies have grappled with earlier than, Dimon identified, including that with AI and enormous language fashions there are additionally large alternatives to enhance dwelling requirements.
“People have to take a deep breath,” Dimon mentioned. “Technology has always replaced jobs. Your children are going to live to 100 and not have cancer because of technology, and literally they’ll probably be working three and a half days a week.”
Staff may reduce on their working hours, because of the expertise getting used to automate a few of their actions, McKinsey present in a report revealed final yr.
The report additionally discovered that generative AI and different rising applied sciences have the potential to automate the duties which take up 60% to 70% of workers’ time for the time being—including between $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion to the worldwide economic system yearly.
And whereas companies are nonetheless grappling with how rapidly AI will remodel their sector, arguments are already being made to cut back the variety of days within the present working week.
A British examine of 61 organizations, carried out by the College of Cambridge, noticed a 65% discount in sick days throughout a four-day working week, whereas 71% of workers mentioned they’d decreased ranges of burnout. Consequently, 92% of the businesses on this system mentioned they’d be conserving a three-day weekend.
Dimon and McKinsey usually are not the primary economics leaders to foretell that expertise will result in a shorter workweek, nonetheless. In a 1930 essay titled “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that his grandchildren’s era could be working 15-hour weeks due to elevated productiveness. The present common in Keynes’s U.Okay. is 36.4 hours.
‘There are negatives’
Like many different thought leaders, Dimon is conscious that the expertise may show to be a strong weapon if it fell into the flawed fingers.
Echoing the issues of people corresponding to Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak and Microsoft cofounder Invoice Gates, Dimon mentioned: “Expertise has completed unbelievable issues for mankind however, , planes crash, prescription drugs get misused—there are negatives.
“This one, the biggest negative in my view, is AI being used by bad people to do bad things. Think of cyber warfare.”
Like Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Dimon additionally says he hopes to see guardrails launched to the sector, although acknowledged this will take a while to come back to fruition as a result of the expertise is comparatively new.
The billionaire boss of the New York–based mostly financial institution additionally famous some workers’ lives can be disrupted by the expertise displacing their roles. In JPMorgan Chase’s case no less than, Dimon mentioned he hopes to “redeploy” any workers who’re pushed out of a job by AI.
He drew comparisons with JPMorgan’s acquisition of First Republic in Could 2023, when the latter financial institution fell sufferer to a wave of banking instability earlier than agreeing to a $10 billion deal.
“At First Republic we’ve offered jobs to 90% of people. They accepted, but we also told them some of those jobs are transitory. But we hire 30,000 people a year, so we expect to be able to get them a job somewhere local in a different branch or a different function if we can do that,” Dimon defined. “We’ll be doing that with any dislocation that takes place as a result of AI.”
A model of this story initially revealed on Fortune.com on October 3, 2023.
