It’s only been three years since OpenAI released ChatGPT into the world, and companies are already shaving down their workforces to make way for AI automation. This has left many employees clinging to their jobs for dear life—but according to Dr. Roman Yampolskiy, a professor of computer science and leading voice in AI safety, no worker is safe.
Despite cab drivers and even teachers like himself saying they’re irreplaceable, he said it’s inevitable that the technology will take over.
“That is not even a question if it’s possible,” Yampolskiy recently said on The Diary of a CEO podcast when discussing jobs being automated by AI. “It’s like, how soon before you [are] fired?”
The computer science professor has joined the cohort of tech leaders—including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla—raising the alarm bells that AI will trigger a jobs armageddon.
But while Amodei thinks that AI could swipe half of white-collar roles in the next five years, spiking unemployment up to 20%, Yampolskiy said that joblessness could reach as high as 99% in that same time frame. And contrary to popular belief, he thinks that workers won’t simply funnel into new roles that haven’t been disrupted or invented by AI yet.
“Before we always said, ‘This job is going to be automated, retrain to do this other job,’” the AI expert said. “But if I’m telling you that all jobs will be automated, then there is no plan B. You cannot retrain.”
There will be record levels of unemployment—but he says humans will have 60 hours of freed time
The engineering professor is steadfast that nearly all jobs will be taken over by AI—even most of the ones that have a special human touch, like teachers and car drivers.
And the career paths that once guaranteed six-figure salaries are also on the way out; he pointed out the very popular computer science track, which he currently teaches at the University of Louisville, and has since been upended by AI.
“Look at computer science. Two years ago, we told people ‘Learn to code—you are an artist, you cannot make money. Learn to code.’ Then we realized, ‘Oh, AI kind of knows how to code and [is] getting better. Become a prompt engineer. You can engineer prompts for AI. It’s going to be a great job. Get a four-year degree in it,’” Yampolskiy said on the podcast. “But then we’re like, ‘AI is way better at designing prompts for other AIs than any human.’ So that’s gone.”
As more jobs get replaced by AI, and roles that are created from this change also get automated, it’s an endless domino effect of unemployment. Yampolskiy warned joblessness will hit an all-time high in the next five years as all human work, including manual labor, is replaced by humanoid robots and AI agents.
“We’re looking at a world where we have levels of unemployment we [have] never seen before,” he revealed. “[I’m] not talking about 10% unemployment, which is scary, but 99%. All you have left is jobs where, for whatever reason, you prefer another human would do it for you. But anything else can be fully automated.”
While that sounds like a dark reality for most workers, Yampolskiy doesn’t seem phased by the inevitable. In fact, he sees an upside in this huge workforce shift—just like other tech leaders, he says massive jobs automation will lead to shorter workweeks.
He echoes the likes of former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates—who said that we’ll clock in just two days a week in the next ten years—and Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang who predicts a four-day workweek. But Yampolskiy optimistically believes work will be scrapped entirely, leaving humans with the question of how they’ll spend their free time.
“I don’t think there is a, ‘This occupation needs to learn to do this instead.’ I think it’s more like, ‘We as a humanity, then we all lose our jobs. What do we do? What do we do financially? Who’s paying for us? And what do we do in terms of meaning? What do I do with my extra 60, 80 hours a week?’”
Yampolskiy isn’t positive where that money is going to come from, but other tech leaders, like Elon Musk, suggest that the technology will create the need for a “universal high income”—where people have access to all the money they need to survive without having a job. Though he isn’t explicit on how much each person would need every year.
“There will be no shortage of goods and services. It will be an age of abundance,” Musk told former U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in 2023. “We won’t have universal basic income. We’ll have universal high income…In some sense, it’ll be somewhat of a leveler, an equalizer.”
This story originally appeared on Fortune
