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When artificial intelligence begins automating jobs once done by humans, women will have to worry more than men, according to a new study by McKinsey & Co.

The report, which was compiled by the consulting firm’s research arm, McKinsey Global Institute, analyzed US labor-market trends through 2030, and found that women are 1.5 times more likely to need to change jobs in the next seven years.

McKinsey attributed the figure to the high amount of women in industries with lower-wage jobs, which will be most affected by AI technology already present in models that are available for public use like ChatGPT, Google’s Bard AI and DALL-E, which generates images.

“Women are heavily represented in office support and customer service, which could shrink by about 3.7 million and 2.0 million jobs, respectively, by 2030,” the report states.

Blacks and Hispanics will also be adversely affected as these workers are “highly concentrated in some shrinking occupations within customer service, food services and production work.”

In all, at least 12 million workers in US could be displaced by technology and switching jobs come 2030, McKinsey said.

The analysis also showed that among low-wage industries, 1.1 million jobs could be entirely swiped from the workforce.

Workers across these in-jeopardy jobs are up to 14 times more likely to need to change occupations than their higher-paid counterparts employed in the transportation, construction and healthcare industries.

For employees want to find a new job with a better salary, “most will need additional skills to do so successfully,” the report noted.

However, not all white-collar positions will be unscathed by the incoming wave of AI in the workforce.

Lawyers are among the high-paid workers who will see “the biggest impact of generative AI” since models “can search through case law, … freeing lawyers to think through how to apply them in new legal arguments.”

AI-backed tools like the ones developed by Sam Altman’s artificial intelligence company OpenAI will also be able to use the tech to edit documents, the form noted, which is usually what lawyers “spend a great deal of time” doing.

Civil engineers’ jobs may also be on the chopping block, as generative AI will “accelerate the design process, taking all building codes into account for fewer errors and less rework.”

McKinsey notes that a streamlined process in planning, designing and executing infrastructure — tasks civil engineers are trained to do — “is vital at a time when the nation needs to deliver more affordable housing and major infrastructure projects.”

However, “physical work is not going away,” the report added, noting that better-paying jobs could grow immensely, by as much as 3.8 million jobs.

Overall, it “probably wont be that kind of catastrophic thing,” McKinsey Global Institute partner Michael Chui told Bloomberg of the impending wave of AI-powered automation in the workforce.

But, it’s still “going to change almost every job,” he added.

If handled correctly, McKinsey said that the US workforce could see a significant increase in productivity and property.

The study reports that in the best-case scenario, productivity could increase from 1%, where it is now, to up to 4%.

It also attributed the shift to net-zero emissions to a decline in the workforce, as it’s already begun shifting employment away from oil, gas and automotive manufacturing.

Some 3.5 million positions could be wiped out by the transition to greener emissions by 2030.

Those jobs will be replaced by positions in green industries, which will see “a modest gain in employment” to the tune of 700,000 additional jobs, according to the report.

“We also see increased demand for healthcare workers as the population ages, plus gains in transportation services due to e-commerce,” McKinsey said.

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Technology

‘Dangerous proposition’: Top scientists warn of out-of-control AI

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'Dangerous proposition': Top scientists warn of out-of-control AI

Yoshua Bengio (L) and Max Tegmark (R) discuss the development of artificial general intelligence during a live podcast recording of CNBC’s “Beyond The Valley” in Davos, Switzerland in January 2025.

CNBC

Artificial general intelligence built like “agents” could prove dangerous as its creators might lose control of the system, two of of the world’s most prominent AI scientists told CNBC.

In the latest episode of CNBC’s “Beyond The Valley” podcast released on Tuesday, Max Tegmark, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the President of the Future of Life Institute, and Yoshua Bengio, dubbed one of the “godfathers of AI” and a professor at the Université de Montréal, spoke about their concerns about artificial general intelligence, or AGI. The term broadly refers to AI systems that are smarter than humans.

Their fears stem from the world’s biggest firms now talking about “AI agents” or “agentic AI” — which companies claim will allow AI chatbots to act like assistants or agents and assist in work and everyday life. Industry estimates vary on when AGI will come into existence.

With that concept comes the idea that AI systems could have some “agency” and thoughts of their own, according to Bengio.

“Researchers in AI have been inspired by human intelligence to build machine intelligence, and, in humans, there’s a mix of both the ability to understand the world like pure intelligence and the agentic behavior, meaning … to use your knowledge to achieve goals,” Bengio told CNBC’s “Beyond The Valley.”

“Right now, this is how we’re building AGI: we are trying to make them agents that understand a lot about the world, and then can act accordingly. But this is actually a very dangerous proposition.”

Bengio added that pursuing this approach would be like “creating a new species or a new intelligent entity on this planet” and “not knowing if they’re going to behave in ways that agree with our needs.”

“So instead, we can consider, what are the scenarios in which things go badly and they all rely on agency? In other words, it is because the AI has its own goals that we could be in trouble.”

The idea of self-preservation could also kick in, as AI gets even smarter, Bengio said.

“Do we want to be in competition with entities that are smarter than us? It’s not a very reassuring gamble, right? So we have to understand how self-preservation can emerge as a goal in AI.”

AI tools the key

For MIT’s Tegmark, the key lies in so-called “tool AI” — systems that are created for a specific, narrowly-defined purpose, but that don’t have to be agents.

Tegmark said a tool AI could be a system that tells you how to cure cancer, or something that possesses “some agency” like a self-driving car “where you can prove or get some really high, really reliable guarantees that you’re still going to be able to control it.”

“I think, on an optimistic note here, we can have almost everything that we’re excited about with AI … if we simply insist on having some basic safety standards before people can sell powerful AI systems,” Tegmark said.

“They have to demonstrate that we can keep them under control. Then the industry will innovate rapidly to figure out how to do that better.”

Tegmark’s Future of Life Institute in 2023 called for a pause to the development of AI systems that can compete with human-level intelligence. While that has not happened, Tegmark said people are talking about the topic, and now it is time to take action to figure out how to put guardrails in place to control AGI.

“So at least now a lot of people are talking the talk. We have to see if we can get them to walk the walk,” Tegmark told CNBC’s “Beyond The Valley.”

“It’s clearly insane for us humans to build something way smarter than us before we figured out how to control it.”

There are several views on when AGI will arrive, partly driven by varying definitions.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said his company knows how to build AGI and said it will arrive sooner than people think, though he downplayed the impact of the technology.

“My guess is we will hit AGI sooner than most people in the world think and it will matter much less,” Altman said in December.

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Politics

Winklevoss brothers mull IPO for Gemini crypto exchange: Report

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Winklevoss brothers mull IPO for Gemini crypto exchange: Report

The Winklevoss brothers are reportedly considering another IPO for Gemini after deciding not to pursue a public listing in 2021.

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Environment

There’s finally(!) an automatic fix to restart failed EV charging sessions

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There's finally(!) an automatic fix to restart failed EV charging sessions

The ChargeX Consortium has figured out how to automatically restart failed EV charging sessions at fast chargers so drivers don’t have to.

Every EV driver has been there. You plug in, walk away to grab food or run errands, and expect your battery to be juicing up at a DC fast charger, only to return and realize nothing happened. Maybe the session failed, or maybe the charger glitched. Either way, you’re stuck unplugging, plugging back in, and now it’s going to take twice as long to charge.

The ChargeX Consortium (National Charging Experience Consortium), which is made up of researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Idaho National Laboratory (INL), and Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), along with industry stakeholders, has come up with a smart fix for one of the most frustrating parts of public EV charging: failed sessions.

Its new report highlights the benefits of what it calls “seamless retry” – a hands-free tech solution that automatically restarts failed charging attempts. In other words, the driver no longer needs to physically unplug and replug the charging connector when a charging session fails.

The consortium’s new tech is designed specifically for DC fast charging. The “novel mechanism” automatically resets both the EV and the charger, then restarts the session in the background, so drivers don’t have to return to the car – or even have to think about it.

Ed Watt, a researcher at NREL and lead author of the “Recommended Practice Seamless Retry for Electric Vehicle Charging” report, said, “With a seamless retry mechanism in place, an EV driver at a retail center can plug in a charging connector, provide user input data, leave to shop, and feel confident that they will return to a charged vehicle.” (Click on the report link to see the specifics of how the novel mechanism works.)

The researchers didn’t just focus on the perks of seamless retry – they also looked at potential downsides. One concern was the extra time it might take for the system to restart a failed session, which could leave drivers frustrated. To tackle that, the consortium suggests that the EV industry provide transparency in the form of real-time status updates, insights into what went wrong, and recommendations based on the type of charging failure and number of attempts made.

Going forward, as the user experience becomes clearer, more work will fine-tune seamless retry. The ChargeX Consortium will keep refining the system – developing smarter, more targeted retry methods, ironing out implementation details, and running verification tests to make sure everything works seamlessly in the real world.

Read more: The latest US EV sales and charger growth – in numbers


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