Is AI About to Automate Every Office Job? | AI Reality Check

Back in February, Microsoft chief executive Mustafa Suleiman sat down for an interview with the Financial Times. During it, he made the following extraordinary claim. I think that we're going to have a human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks. So white collar work where you're sitting down at a computer, either being, you know, a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person, most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months. Now, if this prediction is true.

then we're just a year away from one of the most sudden and calamitous economic shifts in the history of modern economics. I mean, worldwide, the knowledge and technology intensive industries produced over produce over $10 trillion of value per year and make up more than a third of economic activity here in the US. So if basically all of this could be replaced by compute, And this was going to happen by next spring, it would make the industrial revolution seem glacial by comparison. It would be the economic equivalent of the asteroid that killed much of life on Earth, including the dinosaur.

So is it possible that Suleiman is right? And if he's not, what's a more realistic understanding of what AI will and will not be able to do? in the workplace in the near future. Well, it's Thursday, which means it's time for another AI reality check episode. So this is a great opportunity to dive deeper into Suleiman's claims.

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