BANGKOK — Policymakers are moving from debating whether artificial intelligence will hit jobs to issuing stark warnings about AI-led disruption and recommending measures on cushioning the fallout.
International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva warned on Monday that artificial intelligence was hitting the global labor market like a "slow-moving tsunami," with young graduates first in line to be knocked down.
"People to worry about, first and foremost, [are] young people that are coming into the labor market," Georgieva said at a panels on Monday. "Normally, they would get into these routine, repetitive jobs and then grow up the ranks. But if they're gone, I don't think any young person wants to be a barista in a coffee shop as ... professional future."
Speaking on the same panel, Singapore President Tharman Shanmugaratnam, who co-chairs the World Bank's Jobs Council, called for governments to make "crisis-era" support measures a permanent tool for getting young people into work.
What governments did during the Covid-19 pandemic and, in some cases, the global financial crisis "now has to be thought of not as a crisis measure, but as part of the structural, the menu of structural policies," he said.