IBM to Suspend Hiring, Plans to Replace Humans With AI in Thousands of Jobs

Tech major International Business Machines Corp (IBM) has a laid out a strategy under which artificial intelligence (AI) will replace thousands of human job roles in the company in the future.

The plan is to either slow or even suspend hiring in jobs that are not customer-facing. IBM calculates that there are at least 26,000 such job roles in the company that fall in the category that includes mainly back-office functions like human resources.

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According to IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, the company can replace at least one-third of such jobs with artificial intelligence. "I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period," Krishna told Bloomberg News. This means that roughly 8,000 jobs in the company will be subsumed by artificial intelligence in the next fie years.

ChatGPT Impact

Though there has been the buzz about artificial intelligence replacing human roles, the launch of ChatGPT at the end of last year accelerated this possibility. The release of OpenAI's ChatGPT in December last year stunned the artificial intelligence followers as it could carry out a multitude of tasks including writing essays, solving mathematical questions, writing software codes and even creating games, all by uncannily mimicking human behavior.

More Investment in Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence
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Following the buzz the tool created, Google parent Alphabet said it was boosting its AI research and followed it up with the launch of its own ChatGPT rival Bard. Microsoft also announced plans to make huge investments in the artificial intelligence field, suggesting huge competition in the field. In February, Chinese Internet giant Baidu unveiled its artificial intelligence chatbot, which is named 'Wenxin Yiyan' in Chinese or 'ERNIE' in English. Last month, Amazon said the company will invest heavily in artificial intelligence in the aftermath of the huge success of OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Government Moves Around the World

Countries around the world are formulating policies to regulate the new tool. Japan signaled last month it was planning wider adoption of ChatGPT. The development came amid concerns by Japanese corporates about the integration of the game-changing AI tool into their work. Also in April, Chinese cyberspace regulators issued draft regulations for managing generative artificial intelligence in the wake of increasing popularity and booming investment in the segment following the buzz made by OpenAI's ChatGPT. In the US, the Commerce Department has moved in the direction of AI regulation. The department is moving in to set up rules for artificial intelligence tools. US lawmakers have already introduced more than 100 AI-related pieces of legislation since 2021, a Guardian report said.

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The launch of ChatGPT drove home the idea that AI bots can perform a multitude of tasks. It has been proven to be able to produce increasingly sophisticated written content, including legal documents and even author legislation. It can also write a children's book, cover letters and even help students cheat on their essays. The bot also writes computer code to program applications and software, check human coders' language for errors and transform ideas from plain English into programming language.

Related topics : Artificial intelligence
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