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CEO of billion-dollar company reveals the jobs he thinks are safe from AI replacing
A tech CEO has revealed the jobs he believes will be safe despite the rise of AI.
Artificial intelligence is on most people's minds at the moment, with fears growing that entire industries could soon be replaced by robots.
While there's debate over how well AI can really replicate jobs done by humans and concerns over the environmental implications, there's no doubting its here to stay and is only going to get more advanced and increasingly widely used.
Wix CEO Avishai Abrahami admitted that the rise of AI does leave him with concerns about the future of employment, but he believes some sectors will be pretty safe from its impacts.
He told Business Insider: "I'm really worried about the employment market," adding that a "massive amount" of roles will shrink as AI advances.
Abrahami predicts that around 70% of the top 20 most popular jobs in the US today will be affected over the coming five to 10 years.
He also expressed concerns that computers could soon outsmart humans - something some tech leaders believe is already happening in some ways - which was previously only seen as a "science-fiction thing".
Of the jobs he believes will be "a bit safer" from AI, Abrahami lists those that require human performance or interaction, such as those in sports on the performing arts, as "nobody cares" about watching robots running fast or competing against each other.
He added that jobs which require high-level thinking are also currently performed better by humans than AI, and artificial intelligence is also not great at creating new things, so is unlikely to invent a new science at its current level.
Manual jobs such as janitors are "probably really safe", Abrahami predicts, as it requires a lot of handwork which robots are far from able to adequately recreate.
He also believes that jobs in which humans can bring something that's "completely unexpected" will be the areas where they're safe from replacement.
As for jobs that will likely be at risk, Abrahami believes cab drivers, including those for ride-share apps as well as truck drivers, will be at risk with the rise of self-driving car services such as Waymo and Tesla's robotaxi service.
He also believes that customer service and call center roles will also be affected, potentially among the first industries to be lost to AI.
Tech jobs such as software developers and analysts are already being reshaped by AI, with a Google Cloud report from September finding that 90% of software professionals had already adopted AI into their workflow.
It's not all bad news, however, as the rise of AI has also helped to create some jobs which did not exist before.
One example is Wix's xEngineer role, described as a "design-first engineer with deep domain expertise who uses AI as a key part of every workflow", in which a specialist's job will be "amplified" by AI.
Given it's still such early days, there will likely be more previously non-existent roles to come across different sectors for those who are able to harness AI.