A question asked a lot, and the most logical answer is yes. As a defense, you hear that AI will also create new jobs or cannot fully replace jobs.

How bad is it if AI replaces jobs? More and more people moved to well-paid office jobs. Many of them are meaningless in a certain way. Look at the number of people that Twitter recently fired. You can probably do the same work in many organizations with fewer people. And maybe even more. If AI can automate meaningless work, everyone is better off. Ok, maybe not the people who will lose their well-paid meaningless job.

There is another reason why we might need to automate a lot more. While there is a big layoff in the tech sector, most organizations in other sectors are looking for staff. Again, if we can automate the boring and meaningless work, more people will be available to pick up jobs that matter. Jobs that add more value to our society.

If we look forward, we bump into a challenge with the work population. It seems that the world is built upon endless growth and that's not realistic. We don't have unlimited people and resources. The expectation is that the world population will stop growing at a certain moment. This is because the number of kids per household is at an all-time low. For example, in the Netherlands the estimate is that the population will start decreasing after 2035 (source).

At the same time, people get older but don't retire at an older age. Combined with the expected decrease in the world population, we should conclude that in the future we will have fewer people who can pick up jobs while the amount of work is growing. Globally this is not an issue yet, but we should look at the future and start working on solutions. One of them is automation, and AI is one of the tools we can use.

So, I guess it is a good development that AI will replace jobs. The part I'm worried about is HOW this replacement will go. How many norms and values will be pushed aside? I hope none, but I'm afraid it will be too many. Everyone should take responsibility to prevent bad things will happen so that we can automate in a human and environment friendly way!