The founder of the popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot startup Replika says that fears about AI eliminating human jobs are completely “justified” and warns that the tech industry’s current trajectory may trigger widespread social unrest and protests. Eugenia Kuyda, who also serves as the CEO and founder of the AI-powered mini-app platform Wabi, shared her thoughts during a recent live episode of the Platformer podcast. “We’ll live in this very optimistic city where it’s all about like future, future, future, but as soon as you get out of here, like it’s pretty scary. People are really struggling to find jobs, and I think this can only get worse,” Kuyda said.
‘Junior roles are disappearing’
Kuyda pushed back against the industry narrative that AI will automatically create new types of employment. She countered the view that older professions will easily survive the shift, noting that the reality on the ground is already changing.“Probably tech needs to create a better narrative of how this is going to be, but I don’t believe in, ‘oh, it’s just another technology, and we’ll have even more — like radiologists still exist,’” Kuyda explained. Kuyda admitted that her own companies are already scaling back on hiring for entry-level positions.“I’m not hiring people anymore for these junior jobs, and I don’t know who is,” she added, explaining that training and hiring inexperienced workers “becomes extremely expensive and completely not sustainable for a startup”, and “That’s like really bad news, frankly.”
‘AI job losses will lead to protests’
She added that the AI-led job losses will lead to “crazy protests” but she is optimistic about the rapidly advancing technology’s potential to enable more people to create software and build products on their own.“I think that the idea that we can all be creators and can kind of channel our creativity a lot more, can build stuff that before was constrained by developers or designers or whatever — I think that’s kind of cool,” she added.
