CEO Says AI Will Replace So Many Jobs That It'll Cause a Major Recession
The CEO of layaway startup Klarna is claiming that AI is coming for your white-collar jobs — even though his own experiments with replacing human workers with AI were a bust.
Speaking to The Times Tech podcast, the Sweden-based CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski admitted that adoption of the technology will result in "implication[s] for white-collar jobs" that include, but are not limited to, "at least a recession in the short term."
"Unfortunately, I don't see how we could avoid it, with what's happening from a technology perspective," the CEO said in reference to job loss and a recession.
On that part, unfortunately, he may be right: we've been careening headlong towards a recession for a while now, and unemployment rates — affected, no doubt, by AI-obsessed CEOs like Siemiatkowski laying people off in droves — are a huge factor.
Still, those are bold words coming from this particular Swedish CEO, considering that just a few weeks ago, he admitted to Bloomberg that he's looking to rehire for some of the 700 customer service positions he fired in favor of AI in 2024.
The reason? Because, as Siemiatkowski acknowledged, the AIs perform at a "lower quality" than human workers.
Despite prematurely pulling the AI trigger in his own business, the "buy now, pay later" CEO insists the technology will get there.
"I feel like I have an email almost every day from some CEO of a tech or a large company that says we also see opportunities to become more efficient and we would like to compare notes," he told The Times Tech. "If I just take all of those emails and add up the amount of jobs in those emails, it's considerable."
Were Futurism to stake our beliefs by a similar metric, we, too would believe that AI replacing human labor is inevitable. In this writer's inbox alone, there are dozens of similar pitches from companies and so-called "experts" seeking to get our attention from this week alone — and hundreds more where that came from, should we be curious to look.
With AI's present-day capabilities, those emails read as little more than junk mail — but it makes sense that a tech CEO who made his fortune on financial promises would see things a bit differently.
Like other AI boosters, Siemieatkowski added that eventually, the "value of that human touch will increase" and that flesh-and-blood workers will "provide a much higher quality type of service" — after learning new skills, which may or may not become obsolete at some vague point in the future.
Siemieatkowski is, perhaps more than anyone else, the platonic ideal of an AI-boosting CEO — and unfortunately, there are lots of others who will take this kind of prognostication as gospel.
More on clueless CEOs: Duolingo CEO Expresses Astonishment That People Were Mad When He Bragged About Replacing Workers With AI
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