You’re not imagining it: the job market squeeze caused by AI is not a future apocalypse, it’s already happening silently.
Professor Yoshua Bengio spent four decades building the technology that now threatens his job. He’s a professor of computer science at the Université de Montréal, a Turing Award winner and one of the world’s most cited scientists on Google Scholar — and now he’s turned his back on his life’s work to warn that his job is probably already at risk.
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Office jobs, or as Bengio called them, “cognitive jobs, the jobs you can do behind a keyboard,” will be the first victims of automation.
“It’s just a matter of time,” emphasized the AI pioneer on Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast.
“Unless we hit a wall from a scientific point of view, like some obstacle that prevents us from moving forward to make AIs more and more intelligent, there will come a time when they will do more and more things, they will be able to do more and more of the work that people do… And, of course, companies take years to actually integrate this into their workflows, but they are eager to do it. So it’s more a question of time than whether it will happen or not.”
He further admitted that it is Gen Z new hires who are currently being hit hardest by AI, as junior roles are the easiest to cut, consolidate or replace with software — but ultimately, all jobs will be impacted within five years.
It’s not just office jobs that are at risk; even manual labor and democracy itself are threatened
For years, degrees have been sold as the key to success for ambitious young people looking for well-paying, stable jobs. But now even highly qualified students are finding themselves priced out of the market as employers adopt a “wait and see strategy” amid the advancement of AI.
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In the United Kingdom, recent graduates face the worst job market since 2018. And companies like Intel, IBM and Google have been freezing thousands of possible new vacancies that AI should take over in the next five years.
But this isn’t just a hiccup or a reflection of the current economy, Bengio warned. As more companies rely on AI and, in the future, robots, the technology will only get smarter, he said.
“As companies deploy more and more robots, they’re going to collect more and more data. So at some point, that’s going to happen,” Bengio said when asked if AI will be able to eliminate all work. Even young people who try to circumvent automation by abandoning degrees or qualifying for manual jobs are destined for the same dead end.
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“So if you do physical work — as Geoffrey Hinton likes to say, you should be a plumber or something — it’s going to take longer [para a IA substituir seu emprego]but I think this is only temporary.”
Now aware of the devastation AI could cause, Bengio said he regrets his life’s work.
“I should have realized this much earlier, but I didn’t pay much attention to the potentially catastrophic risks,” admitted the 61-year-old scientist. “But my turning point was when ChatGPT came along, and also with my grandson, I realized that it wasn’t clear whether it would have a life in 20 years, because we’re starting to see AI systems that resist being turned off.”
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He has since founded LawZero, a nonprofit focused on building safe AI systems aligned with human values. But at the current rate of change, the warning is clear: it’s not just jobs that are at risk — even democracy could collapse in something like two decades.
His message for CEOs? “Take a step back from your work. Talk to each other and let’s see if together we can solve the problem. Because if we get caught up in this competition, we’re going to take huge risks that aren’t good for you or your children.”
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