Ryan Bridge: The AI takeover isn't coming, it's here

The AI and robot takeover isn't coming, it's here. Well, sort of.

A bunch of data's come out on this over the past few days.

Seek says job ads mentioning AI have doubled in the past year, up 4.1% from March to April.

Nicola Willis reckons AI tools will help shave 9000 odd jobs off the public service in the next four years.

Meta has this morning started firing 10% of its workforce, around 8000 workers in the first round, to make way for AI tools.

The workers are so brassed off, a bunch of them are signing petitions demanding that Zuckerberg NOT collect their computer-use data.

That data is being used to train the AI models that will replace them. Their work is being copied and pasted into a bot that will soon replace them.

A petition will not stop this. Nothing will stop business becoming more efficient.

Resistance is, in this case, futile.

In some cases, new technology is being used to plug gaps, rather than create them.

And this is the irony of the new workforce, which is not human labour, but technology: it cuts both ways.

Take China, for example. Their problem is not a shortage of jobs but of workers. The ageing population and lack of babies is about to hurt their factories.

They're going to lose 37 million workers in the next ten years. That's a few holes to fill in mega-factories.

Enter humanoid robots. Barclays, the British bank, reckons 60% of those jobs will be performed by humanoid robots inside the next ten years.

Basically, there's more chance your next new colleague will be a bot or an AI tool than ever before.

Either learn to get along and play nice with them, or they'll replace you.

Ryan Bridge is a New Zealand broadcaster who has worked on many current affairs television and radio shows. He currently hosts Newstalk ZB's Early Edition - where this article was sourced.