Jamie Dimon says phased integration necessary to ‘save society,’ despite huge benefits of AI
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, said the deployment of artificial intelligence could “go too fast for society” and trigger serious social disruption if not carefully managed.
Dimon spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he stressed that while “advances in AI will have huge benefits, from increasing productivity to curing diseases,” its pace must be carefully managed to avoid harm, according to the Guardian.
The CEO said companies and governments cannot ignore the impacts of AI, saying they should not “put your head in the sand.”
“Your competitors are going to use it and countries are going to use it … and if it goes too fast for society, that’s where governments and businesses [need to] in a collaborative way, step in together and come up with a way to retrain people and move it over time.”
Rapid AI adoption: ‘You will have civil unrest’
Dimon highlighted the potential consequences of undirected automation with a focus on workers in sectors like trucking. He said local assistance programs may be necessary to help with wages, retraining, relocation and early retirement for displaced employees, according to the Guardian
Using the example of commercial truck drivers in the United States, Dimon said: “Should you do it all at once, if two million people go from driving a truck and making $150,000 a year to a next job [that] might be $25,000? No. You will have civil unrest. So, phase it in.”
Dimon further said that even though AI adoption might boost production and lead to breakthroughs such as cures for diseases, society needs plans to manage the pace of disruption, according to the report.
“If we have to do that to save society … Society will have more production, we are going to cure a lot of cancers, you’re not going to slow it down. How do you have plans in place if it does something terrible?”
Tensions at JPMorgan Chase ran high last year in the wake of the company's five-day office-return policy, which saw its CEO swearing following a pushback on the mandate.
AI use and job loss at JPMorgan
At Davos, Dimon also highlighted his bank’s approach to artificial intelligence, saying it has 500 use cases already implemented and 150,000 employees using their internal language model weekly.
"We have use cases in risk, fraud, marketing, errors, customer service, idea generation, hedging. It’s used extensively in credit everywhere," he said, according to Yahoo!Finance.
When asked about potential job losses, Dimon admitted that technology will eliminate some positions while changing others, indicating that JPMorgan will likely have fewer employees in five years despite global growth.
The financial institution is being “fundamentally rewired” for the coming artificial intelligence era, according to Derek Waldron, JPMorgan chief analytics officer, in a CNBC article, which says JPMorgan is looking to provide every employee with AI agents, “automate every behind-the-scenes process and have every client experience curated with AI concierges.”
