‘Will artificial intelligence take your jobs?’ Professor gives warning and advice

Dr. James Maxwell gave a warning to the Chamber of Commerce luncheon at Grace Church of the Heartland about millions of jobs replaced by AI. He was formerly the Dean of the Business School at Lincoln Memorial University.

At the monthly Chamber of Commerce luncheon Dr. James Maxwell warned about the future of jobs with the rise of AI. He said millions of jobs will be eliminated by 2030 if the trends continue. He gave strategies to navigate the new terrain.

Maxwell was the Dean of the School of Business at Lincoln Memorial University and now teaches at Mineral Area College and is on the chamber board.

Maxwell began with a startling statistic: “Ninety to 95 million jobs are going to be eliminated by 2030, according to various knowledgeable skilled research people and scientists,” he said. He said that was nearly a third of the American population.

He said even though there’s not a consensus, from the words of CEOs themselves, the job loss appears to inevitable. On the flip side, there may be more gained from it, some estimating 170 million new jobs.

After researching multiple institutions on job losses, Maxwell concluded nations would need to retrain, especially richer ones like Germany, or the United States.

“I’m not saying this to be an alarmist or strike fear in anyone’s heart,” he said, “but it caught me off guard.”

He said the retraining would need to start at K-12. He nodded to the Fredericktown Assistant Superintendent Melanie Allen in attendance. The Fredericktown School began its AI program this year.

Maxwell shared slides of the some of jobs that could be changed by AI, or are now. There are hundreds. McDonald’s, he said, are beta testing single arm robots that can cook hamburgers. “It cuts down on absenteeism, and lapses in quality, and it doesn’t talk back to you, either.”

Aside from machine assemblers, one of the more unusual jobs replaced by bots he showed were referees in sports, starting with cameras in baseball.

He pointed to the rising unemployment rate, at 1.9 million for six months or more in the workforce. A list of CEOs populated the screen from the likes of Walmart, Anthropic, and Amazon, who invest billions in AI and spoke about it recently.

Doug McMillon, Walmart CEO, for example, said every job is going to change in some way, from shopping carts to leadership or technologists. He said the company will have to adapt, like every other.

Another chart illustrated Maxwell’s earlier point, with the green dots for “jobs created” bigger than the red dots for “jobs lost,” though a wider swathe will remain stable.

The jobs frequently eliminated today, he said, are often in administrative or data entry positions. He listed payroll clerks, managerial reporting, door-to-door sales, graphic designers, claims adjusters and warehouse workers, telephone operators, as a “small sample.”

Some jobs on the rise, Maxwell said are business analytics, data analytics, engineering and manufacturing, or financial engineering, or jobs with data tools like SPSS or SAS for econometric modeling.

Maxwell said he gets asked during presentations how to deal with the shift.

“Employers have to really understand what’s happening and what is going to happen and how it’s going to impact their business and the economy and the lives of Americans as well as the world,” he said.

Some of the strategies to integrate into the new environment include building apprenticeships, community partnerships, or sponsoring job fairs. 

He said many of his gen Z students are anxious about their perceived lack of opportunity.

“I encourage my students to be looking at career identity around transferable skills experiences, reframe the outcomes,” Maxwell said. He advised to look for opportunities outside of your trade, and to have extra income from freelance or a side hustle.

He compared today to a time when the internet was still new, and as a professor, many people thought it would be used to cheat. 

“And what happened?,” Maxwell said. “Everybody’s using it. Professors are using it, everybody is. So my point is — we’re at a point where this will work out somehow.”

He capped off his presentation by acknowledging the uncertainty with AI, and that nobody knew what was going to happen, and that China was poised to outpace the US on AI. He asked, “Who benefits from this?”

But he concluded that every person and every business should be aware of the changes AI is already bringing, and if jobs are lost at an inconceivable rate, we should prepare.