AI revolution or job killer: Will we have more free time soon?

At the premiere of SXSW London 2025, many participants still hoped that artificial intelligence would not endanger their jobs. This year, the tide has turned: very many lectures, discussion rounds and panels revolved around the role that humans will play in the work process in the future and how to manage the work of LLMs and AI agents.

According to tech and AI expert Azeem Azhar of Exponential View, many AI companies were founded in 2023 without their founders having in-depth knowledge of artificial intelligence. However, 20 percent of the companies claim to already be making money from it.

When asked by MIT editor Will Douglas Heaven how many jobs had already been lost due to AI, Azhar explained that there was no evidence that AI had cost jobs. Many companies are using the excuse that layoffs are due to AI. It simply sounds better when someone claims, "we don't need as many people anymore because we are using AI tools so successfully," instead of admitting, "the company isn't doing so well, so we have to lay people off."

His assessment is consistent with a study by Claude developer Anthropic from March 2026. At the same time, Azhar admitted that the uncertain global political circumstances are difficult to separate from the effects of AI. For example, investments are being held back in the face of wars, regional conflicts, and not least the climate crisis, and companies are no longer hiring new staff.

The theoretical possibilities of artificial intelligence are currently hardly being implemented in practice, according to the Anthropic study. Considering that ChatGPT has only been available to everyone for three and a half years, a lot has already changed, Heaven finds. He believes that the use of artificial intelligence could quickly lead to concrete applications, especially in medical research and mathematics. However, in science, AI harbors the danger that research priorities may shift unintentionally and scientists may lose focus.

Ling Ge from Tencent pointed out that companies should not use AI tools blindly and everywhere. The necessary computing power is simply too expensive for that, explained the strategic advisor of the world's largest gaming group and operator of WeChat. The quantum computing specialist is sure that only those companies will survive in the long run that question the use of AI models and use them very specifically.

Dangerous Deep Fakes

Another problem: AI is currently not trustworthy, Douglas Heaven finds. In his view, deep fakes, which are a powerful tool for harming others, contribute to this; women are particularly affected by pornographic content. Furthermore, deep fakes create fundamental mistrust and unsettle the population – in the words of Hannah Arendt.

This applies particularly to the group of people who reject any use of AI. Since AI usually produces very similar results to humans at first glance, deep fakes are also difficult to recognize as such. This is another reason why research into mechanistic interpretability, a kind of reverse engineering and debugging, is being intensified. The goal is no longer to accept AI models as a black box, but to understand how they react and produce in order to make the results predictable.

No Revolution, but Change

For Lucy Liu, founder and president of the fintech company Airwallex, the aspect of trust also plays an important role. While you can vibe code a new application over the weekend, you won't gain user trust in such a short time; a lot of human intervention is still needed here. Relevant decisions and strategies must be determined by humans anyway, Liu explained. In this respect, AI does not revolutionize work, but merely changes it.

Many people do not share this positive view of AI, says former president of the British Chamber of Commerce, Martha Lane Fox. Many are instead afraid of the effects of artificial intelligence. Lane-Fox is also sure that roles in working life will change significantly in the coming years. However, people must learn to accept these changes.

Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan is significantly more optimistic about the changes. He believes that in a few years we will only be working three to a maximum of four days a week. AI can then handle many tasks around the clock, i.e., 24/7, without getting tired, without taking vacation. He urged people to enjoy the longer leisure time instead of mourning lost work. Yuan did not say who would finance the reduced working hours, even when asked.

(uk)