As EV sales surge in China, BYD’s workforce has expanded rapidly, adding nearly 500,000 employees since 2019. BYD’s workforce is now roughly double that of Toyota’s as China’s EV leader expands overseas.
Privately-owned firms, such as BYD and others in the EV industry, are accelerating job growth in China.
According to filings, there were about 30.57 million employees in China at the end of 2023. That’s up 13% from 2019. Private companies accounted for 81% of the growth, or 2.85 million jobs.
“These are things that are superhuman, and we think this will be in every industry, will probably replace 50% of human jobs, create a huge amount of wealth for mankind and wipe out poverty,” https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/27/kai-fu-lee-robots-will-repla…jobs.html” rel=“noopener” class=””>Lee told CNBC at the time, later forecasting that it would happen in the next 10 years.
Fast forward seven years to the Fortune Innovation forum in Hong Kong this past March, when he sat down with Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell.
With the timeline of his prediction just three years away, she asked him if it still holds, and he replied, “It’s actually uncannily accurate. People have criticized me for being too aggressive in 2017, 2018, 2019, and I was a little nervous at the time. But when gen AI came out, I think everybody’s on the bandwagon and believing that is the correct pace.”
Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla, has said that artificial intelligence (AI) will eventually eliminate all jobs. However, he affirmed that this is not necessarily an adverse development.
Speaking at a startup and tech event in Paris on Thursday (May 23) via video link, Musk said, “Probably none of us will have a job”, while predicting a future where jobs would be “optional”
“If you want to do a job that’s kinda like a hobby, you can do a job,” Musk told VivaTech 2024. “But otherwise, AI and the robots will provide any goods and services that you want.”
Apptronik, a NASA-backed robotics company, has unveiled Apollo, a humanoid robot that could revolutionize the workforce — because there’s virtually no limit to the number of jobs it can do.
“The focus for Apptronik is to build one robot that can do thousands of different things,” Jeff Cardenas, the company’s co-founder and CEO, told Freethink. “The best way to think of it is kind of like the iPhone of robots.”
The challenge: Robots have been automating repetitive tasks for decades — instead of having a person weld the same two car parts together 100 times a day, for example, an automaker might just add a welding robot to that segment of the assembly line.
AI has already started replacing voice agents’ jobs. Now, companies are exploring ways to replace the existing computer-generated voice models with synthetic versions of human voices. Truecaller, the widely known caller ID service, is the latest to take this approach with its announcement that it will now allow customers to use its AI-powered Assistant to answer phone calls in their own voice.
The new experience comes via a partnership with Microsoft that allows the Swedish company to use the Redmond giant’s Personal Voice technology, introduced in November as part of Azure AI Speech.
By using Microsoft’s Personal Voice, Truecaller’s Assistant, available to paid users, will be able to replicate users’ voices in order to greet and respond to callers. This is in addition to the preset system-generated voice options available to users through the digital assistance feature that helps answer phone calls for you, screen unknown calls, take messages, respond on your behalf or even record the call.
At the end of the day it just got too expensive to make games, and too risky to release bad ones. Not to mention the political nonsense. AI is now in the wings poised for a take over game development. Will of mostly taken over around 2030. And, it will quickly be back to the old days.
There’s one topic that’s stayed on my mind since the Game Developers Conference in March: generative AI. This year’s GDC wasn’t flooded with announcements that AI is being added to every game — unlike how the technology’s been touted in connection with phones and computers. But artificial intelligence definitely made a splash.
Enthusiasm for generative AI was uneven. Some developers were excited about its possibilities, while others were concerned over its potential for abuse in an industry with shattered morale about jobs and careers.
AI has been a common theme at GDC presentations in years past, but in 2024 it was clear that generative AI is coming for gaming, and some of the biggest companies are exploring ways to use it. With all new technologies, there’s no guarantee they’ll stick. Will generative AI flame out like blockchain and NFTs, or will it change the future of gaming?
Amazon has developed new robots, such as Digit and Sequoia. These robots make it easier and safer to complete monotonous tasks. Sequoia assists Amazon’s warehouses with order processing and inventory management.
It’s not uncommon for tech roles to now receive hundreds or thousands of applicants. Round after round of layoffs since late 2022 have sent a mass of skilled tech workers job hunting, and the wide adoption of generative AI has also upended the recruitment process, allowing people to bulk apply to roles. All of those eager for work are hitting a wall: overwhelmed recruiters and hiring managers.
WIRED spoke with seven recruiters and hiring managers across tech and other industries, who expressed trepidation about the new tech—for now, much is still unknown about how and why AI makes the choices it does, and it has a history of making biased decisions. They want to understand why the AI is making the decisions it does, and to have more room for nuance before embracing it: Not all qualified applicants are going to fit into a role perfectly, one recruiter tells WIRED.
Recruiters say they are met with droves of résumés sent through tools like LinkedIn’s Easy Apply feature, which allows people to apply for jobs quickly within the site’s platform. Then there are third-party tools to write résumés or cover letters, and there’s generative AI built into tools on sites of major players like LinkedIn and Indeed—some for job seekers, some for recruiters. These come alongside a growing number of tools to automate the recruiting process, leaving some workers wondering if a person or bot is looking at their résumé.
