I describe in my book Soulful AI that AI should not be deemed to be a technology. Rather, it's a digital species. It's like no other development that's been created by humanity. You can't compare it to steam, electricity and computer power. The objective of AI is intelligence and the growth of its intelligence, so companies are currently working towards AGI, which is general intelligence, which means it's as good as if not better than humans, with superintelligence being maybe a decade or so behind that.
What will this do to the industrial revolution model that we all live in today? The reality is that we live in a period that is governed by the structure of industrial revolutions. We're currently in 4.0.
The largest line item on anyone's balance sheet, for any corporation or any company, is human labour. The trends over the last 40 years of sending products and services overseas were simply to offset the balance sheet for human labour and the cost of the hourly wage. Let's not kid ourselves that corporations and companies will not look to reduce the head count of their companies if they can, both digital and physical, because they will. These are the trends. Just this past Monday, I think, Meta announced 16,000 layoffs in its organization.
We are in a period when the growing use of AI, currently, I would think, attacking white-collar jobs, is occurring, but inevitably this will affect both blue-collar and white-collar jobs. Inevitably there will be a head count reduction.