AI's Impact on Workforce: Human Supervision Still Essential, Says White House Official

According to Cointelegraph, White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks has addressed concerns regarding artificial intelligence potentially eliminating numerous jobs, emphasizing that AI still requires significant human oversight to deliver tangible business value. His remarks follow a Microsoft study identifying 40 job roles most susceptible to AI replacement, including positions within the crypto sector. Sacks contends that the narrative surrounding AI-induced job losses is exaggerated. In a recent post on X, he highlighted that AI necessitates human prompting and verification to effectively contribute to business operations. He described AI's role as handling intermediate tasks, while humans oversee comprehensive processes. The Microsoft Research study identified knowledge-based roles such as news analysts, reporters, journalists, and technical writers as particularly vulnerable to AI advancements, with similar positions existing in the crypto industry. Customer service representatives also ranked high on the list. The study involved analyzing 200,000 anonymized Microsoft Bing Copilot chats to examine real-world AI applications, revealing its predominant use in information gathering, writing, advising, and teaching. Researchers then evaluated AI's proficiency in executing specific tasks to determine an "AI applicability score" for various roles. Reporting and writing positions scored between 0.38 and 0.39, while data-driven roles like market research analysts and data scientists scored lower, between 0.35 and 0.36. This research coincides with the U.S. Department of Labor's report of only 73,000 new jobs added in July, falling short of the 100,000 forecasted by Dow Jones. In the crypto sector, merely 38 new positions were listed on CryptoJobsList.com in July, with Remote3.co adding 69. Sacks aligns with crypto entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, who challenges prevailing narratives about AI replacing human jobs. Srinivasan argues that AI remains limited, stating, "Today's AI is not truly agentic because it's not truly independent of you." He suggests that AI enhances human capabilities rather than replacing them, asserting, "AI doesn't take your job, it lets you do any job." Srinivasan further explains that AI primarily replaces previous AI iterations, citing examples like Midjourney superseding Stable Diffusion and GPT-4 succeeding GPT-3. Once AI is integrated into workflows for tasks like image or code generation, resources are allocated to the latest models, effectively replacing older AI versions.