The Workplace

[kmaherali]

It’s widely discussed in China: Employers don’t want you after 35. Some job listings say it plainly, leaving a generation of prime-age workers feeling defeated.


Xinmei Liu

When Sean Liang turned 30, he started thinking of the Curse of 35 — the widespread belief in China that white-collar workers like him confront unavoidable job insecurity after they hit that age. In the eyes of employers, the Curse goes, they’re more expensive than new graduates and not as willing to work overtime.

Mr. Liang, now 38, is a technology support professional turned personal trainer. He has been unemployed for much of the past three years, partly because of the pandemic and China’s sagging economy. But he believes the main reason is his age. He’s too old for many employers, including the Chinese government, which caps the hiring age for most civil servant positions at 35. If the Curse of 35 is a legend, it’s one supported by some facts.

“I work out, so I look pretty young for my age,” he said in an interview. “But in the eyes of society, people like me are obsolete.”

China’s postpandemic economic rebound has hit a wall, and the Curse of 35 has become the talk of the Chinese internet. It’s not clear how the phenomenon started, and it’s hard to know how much truth there is to it. But there’s no doubt that the job market is weak and that age discrimination, which is not against the law in China, is prevalent. That is a double whammy for workers in their mid-30s who are making big decisions about career, marriage and children.

“Too old to work at 35 and too young to retire at 60,” said a viral online post — meaning that people of prime working age lack prospects and older people may need to keep working as the government is considering raising the retirement age. The post goes on: “Stay away from homeownership, marriage, children, car ownership, traffic and drugs, and you’ll own happiness, freedom and time.”

Mr. Liang has since moved from Guangzhou in southern China back to his home village because he couldn’t afford his rent of less than $100 a month. He’s not married; neither are three of his cousins, all around his age. He said only people with stable jobs, such as government workers and teachers, could afford to start a family.

Growing competition in the job market is one reason young Chinese are delaying marriages, an official with the national health commission, which oversees demographic policies, was quoted as saying by the Chinese news media last year.

Numbers from the corporate world tell a different story. In the first three months of this year, Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu, among the country’s biggest internet companies and best-paying employers, hired about 9 percent fewer workers than they did during their hiring peak in the pandemic, according to their financial reports. Some of China’s biggest real estate developers cut their head counts by 30, 50 or even 70 percent in 2022.

An empty road bordered on one side by a green wall in a district of apartment blocks still under construction.

Unfinished apartment towers in Suzhou, a sign of China’s troubled real estate sector. Credit...Qilai Shen for The New York Times

“The next few years will be the most challenging time for employment since the reform and opening up” in the late 1970s, Wang Mingyuan, an economist in Beijing, wrote in a widely circulated article. He noted that around 50 million people ages 16 to 40 could be unemployed by 2028, adding, “It could trigger a series of deeper crises.”

In 2022, the number of marriage registrations fell 10.5 percent from a year earlier, to the lowest number since China began disclosing the data in 1986. The country’s birthrate fell to a low point last year, and its population shrank for the first time since 1961, the end of the Great Famine.

Age discrimination affects all older workers, but people in their mid-30s may feel it most acutely because they are experiencing it for the first time.

Flynn Fan started dreading 35 when he was 30. He knew he might be passed over for work in a few years, but until then his problem was overwork.

At his last company, he said, most of his colleagues were either single, like him, or married without children. Their overtime shifts were out of control. For three months in 2021, Mr. Fan said, the earliest he left work was 11 p.m. He started taking anti-anxiety drugs.

Then late last year he was let go, along with most of his colleagues, at an artificial intelligence company in Shanghai.

In the past six months, he has sent his résumé to more than 300 companies and landed 10 interviews with no offer. Now he is looking for jobs that pay 20 to 30 percent less. He also started looking in other cities near Shanghai.

At 35, he feels young. But for society, he said, 35 is like a “plague.”

Cici Zhang is 32 and has already been told by employers that she’s too old. She showed a screenshot of a job posting at a company that sells maternity products, with the age limit set below 32. One of her former supervisors told her that he could replace her with a young graduate after three months of training.

Chinese companies like to chase the hottest trend instead of perfecting what they already have, she said. So experience and expertise aren’t the qualities they value most.‌

As a woman, Ms. Zhang faces added layers of discrimination. Since she was 25, she has fielded questions from employers about when she planned to have children. When she answered that she and her husband had no such plans, she would be asked what their parents thought of their decision.

After being laid off in September, Ms. Zhang, a marketing professional, messaged more than 3,000 companies, sent her résumé to more than 300 and landed fewer than 10 interviews. Last month, she finally got a job offer from a small company.

She accepted the job, feeling no excitement or happiness about it.

“I used to have expectations. I wanted promotions, pay raises and a better life,” she said. “Now I have none. I just want to survive.”

She and her husband feel they can’t afford to have children. They have a mortgage and barely scraped by when she was out of work, while worrying that he, too, could lose his job.

Their anxieties make them wonder whether it’s even fair to have children. Ms. Zhang quoted a popular saying on the internet: “If a child’s birth is meant to inherit one’s toil, panic and poverty, then not giving birth is also a form of kindness.”

Mr. Liang, the 38-year-old tech professional, said something similar. He loves children but doesn’t believe he could give them a good life. Like many Chinese who grew up in the countryside, he was raised by his grandparents while his parents worked in cities. He would not want his children to have that life.

Besides, he first has to find a job. Even before the pandemic, he was asked at an interview why he was applying for a tech support position at his age. He showed me the job listings of his local provincial government: The age requirement for all positions was 18 to 35.

When I commented that 35 must weigh like a mountain, Mr. Liang responded, “It’s the precipice.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/28/busi ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Never before have so many factors converged to create the momentum we now see growing in the Conscious Business movement, Karim.

Everything has changed in the last few years, socially, politically, and in terms of the way people have realized they want to live.

Then there’s the fact that for over a decade, consumers have been “voting with their dollars” and showing companies that they support certain business practices and ideals.

It has become increasingly easy for consumers to separate the companies that are just out for profit from the ones that care about the impact they have on the world. Which means the companies that state their mission and show positive results are more likely to thrive.

The problem is that historically, the business world as a whole has lacked conscious awareness and appreciation of the interconnectedness of all of life, which enables these self-serving practices and negative global impacts to continue.

In reality, business can be a tremendously important catalyst to make shifts that will redefine prosperity, create abundance for all, and restore the self-renewing integrity of the Earth.

These shifts require changes in our approach to business—through which evolved, conscious companies can be sustaining, nurturing, and profitable without the current negative impact many of them have.

Recently, I was asked to share 4 of the essential shifts in approach that make the difference between traditional business models and Conscious Business models. They are:

Recruiting

When a company or organization goes out of its way to attract and hire people who truly embody the values and characteristics of real unity and oneness, the foundation of the organization becomes anchored in a conscious culture. It will then operate with conscious business tenets when the individuals within the organization fully embrace and embody these values.

Company Culture

When the company culture is characterized by deep listening, heart-to-heart communication, and real caring and compassion, it becomes relational instead of transactional. Team members work interdependently toward the same goals and have a shared mission.

Marketing

Because the conscious organization’s goals are far broader and bolder than the bottom line, there is intrinsic value and substance in the company’s offerings and services. These offerings support the individual, the company, the community, and the world. There is no misalignment with the mission statement and the actual work and actions of the organization. This is reflected in the messaging and marketing campaigns the company delivers.

Partnerships

The conscious organization holds an awareness of ALL the partnerships it is involved in—from those with employees, to customers, to vendors, to suppliers and the surrounding community. The goal is to find an honest, win-win situation for all stakeholders rather than to have the upper hand and aim solely for profit. There is an understanding that all life is sacred and the organization must do its level best to support all of its partners and constituent parts in the community. The result is that in this context, partnerships flourish and lead to additional opportunities, ingenuity and yes, often more profit.

With just these four pieces in place, you can see how different the world will be when we transition to Conscious Business practices. And that difference is essential to the survival and wellbeing of humanity and the planet.

We are early in an adoption process but we can say…

There is huge desire building among consumers to support Conscious Businesses.

And there is momentum within the business world to adopt Conscious Business practices.

Which means Conscious Business Change Agents are in high demand, as companies begin to make the necessary shifts to operate within a Conscious Business framework.

If you feel called to learn more about the Conscious Business movement, and how to become a Conscious Business Change Agent, so you can guide companies through these shifts to the Conscious Business future, I invite you to join us for our newest Free Online Video Presentation:

Putting Business at the Forefront of Change:

Conscious Business Practices for a Flourishing World

With Ken Wilber, Alan Gauthier, Chris Laszlo, Alan Watkins, Michael Beckwith, Lindsay Benjamin, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Elisabet Sahtouris, Andrew Harvey, Ilma Barros-Pose, Ozioma Egwuonwu, Lance Secretan, and myself.

Plus, there will be a previously recorded question and answer session with myself and our Dean of the Humanity’s Team Conscious Business Master’s Program, Dr. Larry Clay.

Find out how to access the Free Online Presentation here https://www.humanitysteam.org/mastercla ... 293c2d487f .

This program has something for everyone, whether you are a consultant, trainer, coach, a business owner, an intrapreneur, an entrepreneur, or just someone who cares about bringing conscious practices to the center of our professional life.

I hope you’ll join us to learn more about this important work and how you can be a pivotal part of it.

In Unity & Oneness,
Steve

[kmaherali]

Few shopping experiences are more intimate than a visit to the pharmacy. The contents of your basket may disclose waxy ears, hemorrhoids, insomnia, constipation, a messy rash or the compulsion to try all permutations of the Reese’s product line. The pharmacy is a place where people like to slip in and out unnoticed, hoping the cashier doesn’t linger over each item at checkout.

But privacy is harder to preserve now that drugstores, to thwart shoplifters, increasingly lock their stock behind cabinet doors, with buttons to push in order to get an employee’s attention. A pimply boy has to hail an employee to free his benzoyl peroxide and a 14-year-old girl needs to be watched as she selects a tampon that suits her cycle. Even for adults, it’s hard not to be self-conscious about having a store employee trail you through the drugstore like a personal shopper as you ponder which dental floss to buy.

I thought about this sad atmosphere of surveillance during one of my recent visits to San Francisco, where the broader downtown retail environment has been left tattered by store closures. Walking from aisle to aisle pushing a series of buttons, I felt like an imposition on a pharmacy’s meager staff. After a string of these requests, I left before securing everything I’d planned to buy. The whole experience felt bad: I was sorry for the shopkeeper, sorry for the employees, sorry for being there, sorry for not buying enough. I made no impulse purchases.

There’s good reason for the added security. The material costs of shoplifting are considerable. In 2021, an estimated $94.5 billion nationwide was lost to shoplifting and other forms of “retail shrink” (which includes damaged or lost goods and employee theft). According to a survey conducted by the National Retail Federation in June, 53 percent of consumers believe that retail crimes such as shoplifting and looting have increased in their communities since the pandemic.

The social and economic causes of shoplifting have become a source of debate, as has the extent of the problem. There are complicated questions around criminal enforcement, policing and punishment.

But leaving those issues aside, there is also an undeniable quality-of-life impact from the real or perceived increase in shoplifting. It is felt by shoppers, store employees, security personnel, store owners and our communities — and in ways more serious than awkward encounters over tampon purchases.

The most obvious effect is a sense of increased danger. Stores simply feel less safe. For a variety of reasons, police now seem less inclined to arrest shoplifters. In Chicago, for example, overall arrests for reported thefts dropped from a rate of about 10 percent in 2019 to less than 4 percent in 2022, according to Wirepoints, a right-leaning watchdog group. Of the nearly 9,000 reported retail thefts in Chicago in 2022, only about 17 percent resulted in arrests, Wirepoints said. This apparent shift in policing priorities can put increased pressure on store security personnel and frontline workers to police their own stores, even when they are inadequately prepared to do so.

Most people who work in stores expect to fold shirts, restock shelves and handle customer requests — not to confront brazen and sometimes hostile shoplifters or organized theft rings. Working in an environment in which shoplifting is prevalent is stressful and can be traumatizing. Some workers are even punished for trying to help. In Rincon, Ga., a 68-year-old Lowe’s employee was fired this year after leaving the store to try to stop suspected shoplifters, one of whom punched her. She had worked for Lowe’s for 13 years, but her actions in pursuing the thieves who had left the store were apparently against policy. (She was subsequently rehired.)

The situation can also be demoralizing. “They’re there every day,” an anonymous Old Navy employee told a CBS News affiliate in the Bay Area, speaking of shoplifters in the store. “When I’m on the floor walking around I would say at least 12, 14 during the day.” In one two-day stretch, the employee said, the store was robbed 22 times.

In a recent study, a team of marketing professors looked at how service employees perceive “customer deviant behaviors,” which include minor infractions like incivility and aggression, as well as more serious offenses like shoplifting and fraudulent returns. The researchers found that shoplifting was “by far” the most prevalent and detrimental form of deviant behavior. According to the study, in the presence of a suspected thief the burden of policing often falls to frontline employees, who, depending on company policy, may be expected to guard the store, stand by passively or even assist the thieves as if they were paying customers. These behaviors leave employees feeling frustrated, angry, helpless, targeted, unmotivated and uncomfortable. Allowing shoplifting to continue unimpeded, the authors found, undermines the sense of pride they might otherwise find in their work and the workplace.

Policies that require employees to remain passive in the face of shoplifting can be frustrating. As one employee quoted in the study put it: “You want me to prevent loss, but at the end of the day, if I can’t physically stop someone that I know is stealing, essentially, I’m not loss prevention. I’m just, I’m here to just watch it.” Another employee said policies preventing action make shoplifting too easy: “It is not fair. They have restrained our powers. They have tied our hands. The criminals have all the rights, and we don’t.”

City officials are increasingly aware that shoplifting discourages workers and worsens labor conditions. In May, Mayor Eric Adams announced a program to fight retail theft in New York City, reports of which have increased by 77 percent in recent years, up 45 percent between 2021 and 2022 alone. Among the proposals is an “employee support program” meant to train retail workers in “de-escalation tactics, anti-theft tools and security best practices” to help ensure their own safety.

Shoplifting adds pressure to retailers still reeling from Covid-19 and the ongoing pressures of online alternatives. For small shopkeepers, bodegas and mom-and-pops, losses from theft can be devastating to the bottom line. Even large chains like Walmart, Whole Foods, REI and Walgreens have closed or are planning to close major retail locations in cities like Portland, Ore., and San Francisco. While multiple factors are behind the closures, shoplifting is frequently cited as one of them.

In May, Brian Cornell, the chief executive of Target, called theft “a worsening trend that emerged last year,” warning of a projected loss from retail shrink, including theft, of $500 million more than the previous year. “The problem affects all of us, limiting product availability, creating a less convenient shopping experience and putting our team and guests in harm’s way,” Cornell said. It can also lead to higher prices for everyone else.

The reason retailers traditionally invest in training store personnel is that they believe employees are critical to creating a positive shopping experience. A store that signals that it expects shoppers to steal the merchandise has the opposite effect.

“From the consumer’s perspective, the feeling that everyone is watching you, suspecting you of shoplifting, creates a negative atmosphere,” says Angela Y. Lee, a consumer psychologist and professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern. Lee compares the feeling to the way in which many people have long felt racially profiled while shopping. “If you’re treated like a potential thief,” she says, “you’re going to have a bad experience, which will then make you less likely to shop there.”

Because retailers continue to struggle with underemployment and employee retention, stores are often more sparsely staffed than they once were, and all the more grim. On a recent shopping excursion in Manhattan, I saw something I’d never seen before: a handwritten sign in the window of a major clothing chain, apologizing for closing for an hour midday because of understaffing.

It’s hard not to notice a shift everywhere. Returning to New York City recently by train after an out-of-town trip, I emerged from Penn Station to pick up a few things in a nearby drugstore. When I walked in, the store was nearly empty, the shelves were mostly locked; no one responded when I pressed a button. It was a dispiriting welcome home and an unfortunate way to imagine first-time visitors encountering New York.

Store owners are not the only ones who bear the cost of retail theft. Shoplifting isn’t just their problem. We are all paying a price.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/10/opin ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Technology disruption typically affected blue-collar occupations. Now white-collar workers may feel the brunt of changes.



The jobs most exposed to automation are now expected to be office jobs.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times

The American workers who have had their careers upended by automation in recent decades have largely been less educated, especially men working in manufacturing.

But the new kind of automation — artificial intelligence systems called large language models, like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard — is changing that. These tools can rapidly process and synthesize information and generate new content. The jobs most exposed to automation now are office jobs, those that require more cognitive skills, creativity and high levels of education. The workers affected are likelier to be highly paid, and slightly likelier to be women, a variety of research has found.

“It’s surprised most people, including me,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered A.I., who had predicted that creativity and tech skills would insulate people from the effects of automation. “To be brutally honest, we had a hierarchy of things that technology could do, and we felt comfortable saying things like creative work, professional work, emotional intelligence would be hard for machines to ever do. Now that’s all been upended.”

A range of new research has analyzed the tasks of American workers, using the Labor Department’s O*Net database, and hypothesized which of them large language models could do. It has found these models could significantly help with tasks in one-fifth to one-quarter of occupations. In a majority of jobs, the models could do some of the tasks, found the analyses, including from Pew Research Center and Goldman Sachs.

For now, the models still sometimes produce incorrect information, and are more likely to assist workers than replace them, said Pamela Mishkin and Tyna Eloundou, researchers at OpenAI, the company and research lab behind ChatGPT. They did a similar study, analyzing the 19,265 tasks done in 923 occupations, and found that large language models could do some of the tasks that 80 percent of American workers do.

College-Educated Workers Are Most Exposed to A.I.

Researchers at OpenAI estimated the share of tasks in each occupation that could be assisted by A.I. tools.

The median percentage of tasks that could be done by A.I. in jobs that require a high school diploma or less is 10 percent. It's 18 percent for those requiring a high school diploma; 38 percent for a two-year or vocational degree; 70 percent for a four-year degree; and 64 percent for a graduate degree.

For jobs that often require ...

SHARE OF JOB TASKS POTENTIALLY AIDED BY A.I.

High school diploma or less

Jobs like: sewing machine operators,

dry cleaners, fast-food workers

6%

High school diploma

Manicurists and pedicurists,

actors, security guards

17%

Vocational or 2-yr. degree

Electricians, paramedics,

facilities managers

38%

Four-year degree

Nurses, nuclear engineers,

human resources specialists

75%

Graduate school

Pharmacists, psychiatrists,

lawyers

64%

The percentage shown is the median percentage by education category.Source: OpenAI (ratings), Labor Department (job categories)By The New York Times
Yet they also found reason for some workers to fear that large language models could displace them, in line with what Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, told The Atlantic last month: “Jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop.”

The researchers asked an advanced model of ChatGPT to analyze the O*Net data and determine which tasks large language models could do. It found that 86 jobs were entirely exposed (meaning every task could be assisted by the tool). The human researchers said 15 jobs were. The job that both the humans and the A.I. agreed was most exposed was mathematician.

Image
A middle-aged man standing in a carpentry workshop is holding a window frame for a film set.

For now, skills like carpentry seem safer from A.I. disruption.Credit...Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times

Just 4 percent of jobs had zero tasks that could be assisted by the technology, the analysis found. They included athletes, dishwashers and those assisting carpenters, roofers or painters. Yet even tradespeople could use A.I. for parts of their jobs like scheduling, customer service and route optimization, said Mike Bidwell, chief executive of Neighborly, a home services company.

While OpenAI has a business interest in promoting its technology as a boon to workers, other researchers said there were still uniquely human capabilities that were not (yet) able to be automated — like social skills, teamwork, care work and the skills of tradespeople. “We’re not going to run out of things for humans to do anytime soon,” Mr. Brynjolfsson said. “But the things are different: learning how to ask the right questions, really interacting with people, physical work requiring dexterity.”

ChatGPT. ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence language model from a research lab, OpenAI, has been making headlines since November for its ability to respond to complex questions, write poetry, generate code, plan vacations and translate languages. GPT-4, the latest version introduced in mid-March, can even respond to images (and ace the Uniform Bar Exam).

Bing. Two months after ChatGPT’s debut, Microsoft, OpenAI’s primary investor and partner, added a similar chatbot, capable of having open-ended text conversations on virtually any topic, to its Bing internet search engine. But it was the bot’s occasionally inaccurate, misleading and weird responses that drew much of the attention after its release.

Bard. Google’s chatbot, called Bard, was released in March to a limited number of users in the United States and Britain. Originally conceived as a creative tool designed to draft emails and poems, it can generate ideas, write blog posts and answer questions with facts or opinions.

Ernie. The search giant Baidu unveiled China’s first major rival to ChatGPT in March. The debut of Ernie, short for Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration, turned out to be a flop after a promised “live” demonstration of the bot was revealed to have been recorded.

For now, large language models will probably help many workers be more productive in their existing jobs, researchers say, akin to giving office workers, even entry-level ones, a chief of staff or a research assistant (though that could signal trouble for human assistants).

Take writing code: A study of Github’s Copilot, an A.I. program that helps programmers by suggesting code and functions, found that those using it were 56 percent faster than those doing the same task without it.

“There’s a misconception that exposure is necessarily a bad thing,” Ms. Mishkin said. After reading descriptions of every occupation for the study, she and her colleagues learned “an important lesson,” she said: “There’s no way a model is ever going to do all of this.”

Large language models could help write legislation, for instance, but could not pass laws. They could act as therapists — people could share their thoughts, and the models could respond with ideas based on proven regimens — but they do not have human empathy or the ability to read nuanced situations.

The version of ChatGPT open to the public has risks for workers — it often gets things wrong, can reflect human biases, and is not secure enough for businesses to trust with confidential information. Companies that use it get around these obstacles with tools that tap its technology in a so-called closed domain — meaning they train the model only on certain content and keep any inputs private.

Morgan Stanley uses a version of OpenAI’s model made for its business that was fed about 100,000 internal documents, more than a million pages. Financial advisers use it to help them find information to answer client questions quickly, like whether to invest in a certain company. (Previously, this required finding and reading multiple reports.)

It leaves advisers more time to talk with clients, said Jeff McMillan, who leads data analytics and wealth management at the firm. The tool does not know about individual clients and any human touch that might be needed, like if they are going through a divorce or illness.

Aquent Talent, a staffing firm, is using a business version of Bard. Usually, humans read through workers’ résumés and portfolios to find a match for a job opening; the tool can do it much more efficiently. Its work still requires a human audit, though, especially in hiring, because human biases are built in, said Rohshann Pilla, president of Aquent Talent.

Harvey, which is funded by OpenAI, is a start-up selling a tool like this to law firms. Senior partners use it for strategy, like coming up with 10 questions to ask in a deposition or summarizing how the firm has negotiated similar agreements.

“It’s not, ‘Here’s the advice I’d give a client,’” said Winston Weinberg, a co-founder of Harvey. “It’s, ‘How can I filter this information quickly so I can reach the advice level?’ You still need the decision maker.”

He says it’s especially helpful for paralegals or associates. They use it to learn — asking questions like: What is this type of contract for, and why was it written like this? — or to write first drafts, like summarizing a financial statement.

“Now all of a sudden they have an assistant,” he said. “People will be able to do work that’s at a higher level faster in their career.”

Other people studying how workplaces use large language models have found a similar pattern: They help junior employees most. A study of customer support agents by Professor Brynjolfsson and colleagues found that using A.I. increased productivity 14 percent overall, and 35 percent for the lowest-skilled workers, who moved up the learning curve faster with its assistance.

“It closes gaps between entry-level workers and superstars,” said Robert Seamans of N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, who co-wrote a paper finding that the occupations most exposed to large language models were telemarketers and certain teachers.

The last round of automation, affecting manufacturing jobs, increased income inequality by depriving workers without college educations of high-paying jobs, research has shown.

A.I. could perhaps do this again — for example, if senior managers called on large language models to do the work of junior staffers, potentially increasing the earnings of executives while displacing the jobs of those with less experience. But some scholars say large language models could do the opposite — decreasing inequality between the highest-paid workers and everyone else.

“My hope is it will actually allow people with less formal education to do more things,” said David Autor, a labor economist at M.I.T., “by lowering barriers to entry for more elite jobs that are well paid.”


A correction was made on Aug. 24, 2023: An earlier version of a chart with this article misstated some median percentages of job tasks that could potentially be aided by artificial intelligence. For jobs that often require a high school diploma or less, it is 6 percent, not 10 percent; for those requiring a high school diploma, it is 17 percent, not 18 percent; for those requiring a four-year degree, it is 75 percent, not 70 percent.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/24/upsh ... -jobs.html

[kmaherali]

Watch video at:

https://hbr.org/2023/08/ai-wont-replace ... without-ai

Summary.

Karim Lakhani is a professor at Harvard Business School who specializes in workplace technology and particularly AI. He’s done pioneering work in identifying how digital transformation has remade the world of business, and he’s the co-author of the 2020 book Competing in the Age of AI. Customers will expect AI-enhanced experiences with companies, he says, so business leaders must experiment, create sandboxes, run internal bootcamps, and develop AI use cases not just for technology workers, but for all employees. Change and change management are skills that are no longer optional for modern organizations.

Just as the internet has drastically lowered the cost of information transmission, AI will lower the cost of cognition. That’s according to Harvard Business School professor Karim Lakhani, who has been studying AI and machine learning in the workplace for years. As the public comes to expect companies that deliver seamless, AI-enhanced experiences and transactions, leaders need to embrace the technology, learn to harness its potential, and develop use cases for their businesses. “The places where you can apply it?” he says. “Well, where do you apply thinking?”

For this episode of our video series “The New World of Work”, HBR editor in chief Adi Ignatius sat down with Lakhani, author of Competing in the Age of AI: Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World, to discuss:

How executives and regular employees can (and must) develop a digital mindset
Change management as a critical skill that must be in the DNA of any successful organization
The shapes AI may take in the near and far future
“The New World of Work” explores how top-tier executives see the future and how their companies are trying to set themselves up for success. Each week, Ignatius talks to a top leader on LinkedIn Live — previous interviews included Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi. He also shares an inside look at these conversations —and solicits questions for future discussions — in a newsletter just for HBR subscribers. If you’re a subscriber, you can sign up here.

ADI IGNATIUS:

Karim, welcome to the show.

Insight Center Collection
The New World of Work
Previous episodes
Karim Lakhani:

So glad to be here with you today, Adi.

ADI IGNATIUS:

You co-wrote a piece for us a few years ago, and it’s reflected in your book, where you say machine learning has basically changed the very rules of business. That’s a big statement. What do you mean by that?

https://hbr.org/2023/08/ai-wont-replace ... without-ai

[kmaherali]

The tech company that helped millions of people work from home is finally tired of its employees being far away. It’s not the only one that feels that way.



The company behind popular video conferencing software has mandated that its employees return to working in the office, at least part-time.Credit...Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

During the early months of the pandemic, a certain company went suddenly from relative obscurity to the type of popularity that made it a noun, verb and catchphrase.

“Can you set up a Zoom for us?”

“Let’s just Zoom.”

“I have Zoom fatigue.”

Revenue for the video conferencing company soared in 2020 — a jump driven by the millions of people who started working from home. Zoom was also part of the remote work shift that it powered, with most of its employees permitted to work from home.

But now, joining a swell of other tech firms pushing for in-person work, Zoom is requiring many of its 7,400 employees to start showing up at the office.

The company last week asked all employees within 50 miles of an office to work in person on a part-time basis, a plan Zoom said it would roll out in August and September.

“We believe that a structured hybrid approach — meaning employees that live near an office need to be on site two days a week to interact with their teams — is most effective for Zoom,” a company spokesperson said. “We’ll continue to leverage the entire Zoom platform to keep our employees and dispersed teams connected and working efficiently.”

During a tense meeting last week about the return to office policy, held on Zoom, Eric Yuan, the chief executive, faced a series of questions from employees who expressed frustration about the time and money they’d waste while commuting, according to an employee who was at the meeting but was not authorized to speak publicly about internal company matters.

In 2020, participants in daily Zoom meetings leaped to over 300 million, from 10 million the year before, as it became the most downloaded free iPhone app of the year. But the company has struggled to maintain its pandemic growth. In February, amid a wave of layoffs across the tech industry, Zoom cut 15 percent of its staff, or about 1,300 people. The company’s work force had grown more than 275 percent between July 2019 and October 2022.

On an earnings call in May, Mr. Yuan said he was confident in the future of workplace flexibility and the benefits it had brought for his company. “I think hybrid work is going to stay,” he said.

Zoom, like many other tech companies, is still holding on to some flexibility, requiring its employees to come in only on a part-time basis.

Hybrid and remote work levels remain far above what they were prepandemic. As of July, nearly one-third of the country’s full-time workers were in hybrid arrangements, spending some days working from home and some in an office, according to researchers at Stanford.

But dozens of companies have joined Zoom in tightening their policies on office attendance this summer, as offices remain at just under half of their prepandemic occupancy levels.

Google, which has asked employees to come into the office three days a week, announced that managers could take unexcused absences from the office into account when doing performance reviews and could use badge records to identify those absences. Salesforce, taking a softer approach, said it would give a $10 charitable donation per day on behalf of any employee who came into the office for a 10-day period in June.

Many companies have faced fierce resistance as they call people back to the office. Hundreds of Amazon’s corporate employees walked off the job for an hour in May, protesting the company’s announcement that they had to return to the office at least three days a week. At Apple, corporate employees signed petitions protesting their return to the office.

At the start of the pandemic, the tech industry was quick to embrace flexible work, which was enabled by the industry’s own products, including Slack (owned by Salesforce), Gmail and Zoom.

But many of those companies realized that they didn’t want their employees to remain permanently scattered. Nick Bloom, a Stanford economist and expert on hybrid work, said the tech industry’s move back to the office was no surprise given the amount these companies spend on office real estate.

Mr. Bloom said Zoom, for example, had all the downsides of fully remote work — some employees feeling disconnected — without the company seeing its financial upsides, like saving money on office space, because the company was still paying for Bay Area real estate and Bay Area employees.

“They’re paying for their office and hiring local people so they get no upside from being fully remote,” Mr. Bloom said. “The most surprising thing to me was they took so long to formally announce this.”

Recent studies have confirmed some benefits to in-person work. A working paper released earlier this year from economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the University of Iowa and Harvard found that at one tech firm, remote work decreased the amount of feedback that junior employees received on their work. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that remote work at M.I.T. led to a 38 percent decline in “weak ties,” meaning the loose connections that help advance people’s careers.

Still, more than 90 percent of workers who can do their jobs remotely now want some flexibility in where they work, according to Gallup.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/07/busi ... ffice.html

[kmaherali]

Employees across many sectors urged to take artificial intelligence seriously



Artificial intelligence is here and experts say employees across many sectors of the economy should learn how to use AI themselves or risk being replaced. (Andrea Verdelli/Getty Images)

It's smart, efficient and gaining speed.

In fact, you might be surprised to hear how much of the workload artificial intelligence can already handle at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto.

"In our hospital, we have a saying that AI is not going to replace clinicians, but clinicians who use AI are going to replace clinicians who don't use AI," said Dr. Muhammad Mamdani, vice-president of data science and advanced analytics at Unity Health Toronto.

In a rapidly changing world surrounded by technology, this is a warning that workers in many industries may now need to take seriously. Artificial intelligence is here and experts say workers across most sectors — from finance to law to coding — now need to learn how to use AI themselves or risk being replaced.

"There is an urgent need for many people in the workforce to start taking artificial intelligence seriously — if they aren't already. Learn how to use it so it isn't used against you," said Ottawa economist Armine Yalnizyan, who focuses on the future of work.

Unity Health Toronto, the hospital network that includes St. Michael's, has a dedicated applied AI team and says it has launched more than 50 innovations since 2017.

"We have algorithms that are running, monitoring patients, every hour on the hour. It has reduced human effort on simple tasks by over 80 per cent. Tasks that normally take two to four hours every day by a few people, it's reduced to under 15 minutes," Mamdani said.

//VIDEO WATCH | AI adapters and opponents debate the future of work:

//AI adapters vs. opponents: Debating the future of work
//3 days ago
//Duration16:07
Artificial intelligence is becoming a major part of our world and has the potential to change work forever, but is it a threat or an opportunity? The National brings together people using AI to improve their work or workplace and others who see it as a hazard to their jobs.

In an era of chronic labour shortages in health care, the technology is offering huge relief to staff who Mamdani says can now better focus on patients while also saving lives.

But has it already replaced workers? Not yet, said Mamdani.

But that doesn't mean it won't.

The most recent Statistics Canada report in 2020 suggested up to 40 per cent of Canadian workers were at high to moderate risk of job transformation. Predictions on when that could happen range from five to 20 years. But there is evidence to show that shift is already occurring.

-ANALYSISChatGPT may reset the world of work as businesses rush to own artificial intelligence https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/chatgp ... -1.6739025
-AI could upend the video game industry. Developers worry it threatens their jobs https://www.cbc.ca/radio/video-games-ar ... -1.6974408

Mamdani said St. Michael's could reduce staffing by 20 to 30 per cent through efficiencies using things like natural language processing to go through data and collect information.

Just one algorithm the hospital has at work now does a vast majority of scheduling for nurses, for example in the emergency room.

"It looks at historical data, all sorts of patterns. It scrapes the web for weather data to see if there's going to be a snowstorm tomorrow night. It looks for events like marathons on Lakeshore Boulevard on Sunday," said Mamdani.

"We can tell you Saturday, from noon to six, there'll be 80 patients waiting in the emergency department. Ten of them will have mental health issues, 12 of them will be hard to treat."

A man with greying hair and glasses, wearing a shirt and blazer, smiles at someone who cannot be seen in the photo.

Dr. Muhammad Mamdani, vice-president of data science and advanced analytics at Unity Health Toronto, said artificial intelligence is saving lives at St. Michael’s Hospital and warned that workers need to educate themselves on how to use this technology. (Robert Krbavac/CBC)

Mamdani is just one employer who is warning about what the future has in store. This transformation of work is happening in many fields beyond medicine, with uncertainty rising for some as they brace themselves for what comes next.

Illustrator Martin Deschatelets is worried he won't have a job next year.

"I didn't get as many contracts last year. Is it because buddy decided to do it himself, with the AI? I don't know," said Deschatelets, who lives in Ottawa.

"I only know a handful of people with jobs right now."

//VIDEO WATCH | Why keep pace with changing technology?:

//Why keep up with the fast pace of AI technology?
//3 days ago
//Duration0:26
//Jeff Macpherson, director of Xagency.AI, argues the merits of learning artificial intelligence in order to keep up with the fast pace of technology with //writer C.L. Polk and illustrator Martin Deschatelets.

With the use of generative AI and the explosion of apps such as ChatGPT, Deschatelets said the reality of how quickly this technology is advancing hit him hard this year.

Deschatelets said he felt a real sense of fear when people started writing "entire children's books over a weekend" using AI. He has now seen AI make everything from logos to books to an entirely AI-generated episode of South Park, a popular U.S. television sitcom normally produced entirely by people.

"In a generation from now, why would you want to become an artist? Why would you want to become a writer if a computer could just do it?" Deschatelets said.

Which jobs will be most affected?

The idea that AI is coming for white-collar jobs is not new. But experts say we don't have the full understanding of what's to come.

"It is happening everywhere, in every industry. It's happening to coders, it's happening to translators, it's happening to engineers, it's happening to people working in law, it's happening in every sector," said Yalnizyan.

The most current version of artificial technology, Yalnizyan said, differs from what we've seen in the past.

"It is evolving very rapidly and in a way that is humanesque in its ability to almost think. We're not there yet, but we might be moving there faster than anybody has anticipated. Never before in history have we been less sure of our predictions of what is about to happen, which means we should be much more cautious about how we are approaching it."

//VIDEO WATCH | Why people need to adapt to the changing technology:

//Changing AI technology requires adaptation
//3 days ago
//Duration0:34
//Dr. Muhammad Mamdani said he sees a need for people to adapt to the changing technology.

So with that information, what do you tell an 18-year-old about the future of work? Would you tell them not to get into coding? Not to become a writer? An illustrator?

Yalnizyan points to the introduction of the calculator: there are still accounting jobs.

"It's a tool that made everybody's jobs easier and faster," said Yalnizyan.

But now imagine an accountant who chose not to learn how to use a calculator.

"We should all, especially young people, be much more conversant about technology, learn how to use it and work with it, especially in a world that is dominated by technology," Yalnizyan said.

Who needs to prepare?[/img]

There is an urgent need for 25- to 54-year-olds in particular to learn how to work with this technology, Yalnizyan said. Members of this group are already in the workforce but are the least likely to have learned AI while in school and will most likely need it for their jobs at some point.

"Universities, colleges and high schools should be teaching every child everything they know about every generation of this technology because it is changing fast," Yalnizyan said.

A woman wearing a flowery-patterned dress sits at a conference table and gestures with her hands as she speaks with a serious expression on her face.

Economist Armine Yalnizyan said it has never been more urgent for workers and students to educate themselves on how to use artificial intelligence if they want to survive in the workforce. (Robert Krbavac/CBC)

For people like Deschatelets, it doesn't feel that straightforward.

"There's nothing to adapt to. To me, writing in three to four prompts to make an image is nothing. There's nothing to learn. It's too easy," he said.

His argument is the current technology can't help him — he only sees it being used to replace him. He finds AI programs that can prompt engineered images, for example, useful when looking for inspiration, but aside from that, it's not much use.

"It's almost treating art as if it's a problem. The only problem that we're having is because of greedy CEOs [of Hollywood studios or publishing houses] who make millions and millions of dollars, but they want to make more money, so they'll cut the artists completely. That's the problem," he said.

'Down to the bottom line'

Jeff Macpherson warns against that approach.

"It comes down to the bottom line, and businesses as they grow that number need to get larger while things start getting cut. And they're going to implement AI just because it's cheaper, faster and it's scalable," he said.

Macpherson is a director and co-founder at Xagency.AI, an agency in the Greater Toronto Area that helps companies incorporate AI into their workforces in ways ranging from customer service centres to blogs and sales.

"Do I have empathy [for] the fact that it can take people's jobs? Yes. But there's an opportunity for experts in their field — so writers, accountants, whoever — to get ahead of the technology and learn to make it work for them," he said.

A man with short hair and a beard, wearing a light-coloured sweater, smiles at someone who cannot be seen to one side of the image.

Jeff MacPherson is a director and co-founder at Xagency.AI, which helps companies incorporate artificial intelligence into their workforces. (Robert Krbavac/CBC)

He echoed Mamdani and Yalnizyan, suggesting that the way forward for humans is learning to adapt and get on board with this technology.

- ANALYSISCan the free market ensure artificial intelligence won't wipe out human workers? https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/post-a ... -1.6962905
- The 'perfect' teaching assistant? Universities find new uses for AI https://www.cbc.ca/news/ai-chatgpt-open ... -1.6958321

Not all industries are equal

There will likely be variation in how this all shakes out. Not all industries are expected to see massive transformation.

"Jobs that require manual work — so, construction workers, early childhood educators, nurses, support workers — those jobs are the least likely to need AI in any large capacity or to be displaced by AI," Joel Blit, an associate professor of economics at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ont., said.

"Cognitive jobs tend to pay more — and so I don't want to say you should go for the manual jobs to be safe. That is almost like saying don't get an education because it's going to be less risky."

- Teachers turn to AI to make workload more manageable, chart lesson plans https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ ... -1.6949046
- Artificial intelligence is being used in university classes. How it's being used matters, say profs https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-sco ... -1.6968138

But Blit expects that over the next 40 years, there is going to be a tremendous job disruption.

The best thing students can do, he said, is "embrace the technology" and make sure to develop some broad, flexible skills — in areas such as entrepreneurship or cognitive thinking — so you can pivot if needed.

//VIDEO WATCH | AI could replace or enhance labour:

//AI can enhance labour, or replace it
//3 days ago
//Duration0:51
//Economist Armine Yalnizyan said artificial intelligence can be either ‘labour replacing or labour enhancing,' during an exchange with Jeff Macpherson, //director and co-founder of Xagency.ai.

Still, Blit has a concern about the future of AI.

"Any time there is a technology that is moving quickly it's always going to be hard to keep up with regulation — the government needs to act."

Blit said in the past it has been hard to get the federal government to take much action because it felt too far in the future, but there is a renewed and urgent interest as AI "exploded" overnight.

"The major thing that has changed is people can use it at their fingertips," he said. "It used to only be corporations who were working with the technology."

- New app uses AI to help Calgary medical students practise interacting with patients https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/ ... -1.6975645
- Ottawa unveils new AI code of conduct for Canadian companies https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ai-fed ... -1.6979301

There are risks to over-regulation, however. For one, Blit and Yalnizyan point out, Canada is in a race with the rest of the world to build smart technology. Too much regulation could prevent innovation or hold the country back if, for example, Canada decided to regulate certain elements of AI but another country didn't.

"But that doesn't mean there aren't ways to protect the human impact, and we need to be thinking about that," Blit said.

"With every new technology, there are winners and losers. In order to prevent the human impact, we need to prepare with things like maintaining a generous social service net and thinking about retraining programs."

Watch full episodes of The National on CBC Gem, the CBC's streaming service.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Angela Hennessy


Angela Hennessy is a producer for The National. Before landing at CBC in 2015, Angela was a reporter for various Toronto news outlets. She graduated from Ryerson University with a degree in journalism and also has a bachelor of arts and international relations from Western University.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/artifici ... -1.6978515

[kmaherali]

Amazon Introduces Q, an A.I. Chatbot for Companies

Amazon has been racing to shake off the perception that it is lagging in the push to take advantage of artificial intelligence.

video: https://vp.nyt.com/video/2023/11/27/113 ... g_720p.mp4
Amazon’s new A.I. chatbot, Q.CreditCredit...Video by Amazon Web Services

OpenAI has ChatGPT. Google has the Bard chatbot. Microsoft has its Copilots. On Tuesday, Amazon joined the chatbot race and announced an artificial intelligence assistant of its own: Amazon Q.

The chatbot, developed by Amazon’s cloud computing division, is focused on workplaces and not intended for consumers. Amazon Q aims to help employees with daily tasks, such as summarizing strategy documents, filling out internal support tickets and answering questions about company policy. It will compete with other corporate chatbots, including Copilot, Google’s Duet AI and ChatGPT Enterprise.

“We think Q has the potential to become a work companion for millions and millions of people in their work life,” Adam Selipsky, the chief executive of Amazon Web Services, said in an interview.

ImageAdam Selipsky speaks in front of a colorful screen that says “A.W.S. re: Invent.”

Adam Selipsky, the head of Amazon Web Services, last year. He said companies wanted to use chatbots but were concerned about data security and privacy.Credit...Noah Berger/Amazon Web Services, via Associated Press

Amazon has been racing to shake off the perception that it is lagging behind in the A.I. competition. In the year since OpenAI released ChatGPT, Google, Microsoft and others have jumped into the frenzy by unveiling their own chatbots and investing heavily in A.I. development.


Amazon was quieter about its A.I. plans until more recently. In September, it announced that it would invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, an A.I. start-up that competes with OpenAI, and develop advanced computing chips together. Amazon also introduced a platform this year that allows customers to have access to different A.I. systems.

As the leading provider of cloud computing, Amazon already has business customers storing vast amounts of information on its cloud servers. Companies were interested in using chatbots in their workplaces, Mr. Selipsky said, but they wanted to make sure the assistants would safeguard those hoards of corporate data and keep their information private.

Many companies “told me that they had banned these A.I. assistants from the enterprise because of the security and privacy concerns,” he said.

In response, Amazon built Q to be more secure and private than a consumer chatbot, Mr. Selipsky said. Amazon Q, for example, can have the same security permissions that business customers have already set up for their users. At a company where an employee in marketing may not have access to sensitive financial forecasts, Q can emulate that by not providing that employee with such financial data when asked.

Image

Amazon Q is intended to help employees with daily tasks, including answering questions about corporate policy.Credit...Amazon Web Services

Image

Credit...Amazon Web Services

Companies can also give Amazon Q permission to work with their corporate data that isn’t on Amazon’s servers, such as connecting with Slack and Gmail.

Unlike ChatGPT and Bard, Amazon Q is not built on a specific A.I. model. Instead, it uses an Amazon platform known as Bedrock, which connects several A.I. systems together, including Amazon’s own Titan as well as ones developed by Anthropic and Meta.

The name Q is a play on the word “question,” given the chatbot’s conversational nature, Mr. Selipsky said. It is also a play on the character Q in the James Bond novels, who makes stealthy, helpful tools, and on a powerful “Star Trek” figure, he added.

Pricing for Amazon Q starts at $20 per user each month. Microsoft and Google both charge $30 a month for each user of the enterprise chatbots that work with their email and other productivity applications.

Amazon Q was one of a slew of announcements that the company made at its annual cloud computing conference in Las Vegas. It also shared plans to beef up its computing infrastructure for A.I. And it expanded a longtime partnership with Nvidia, the dominant supplier of A.I. chips, including by building what the companies called the world’s fastest A.I. supercomputer.

Image

An image of Nvidia and Amazon’s forthcoming DGX Cloud Project Ceiba, which they describe as the world’s fastest A.I. supercomputer.Credit...via Nvidia

Most such systems use standard microprocessors along with specialized chips from Nvidia called GPUs, or graphics processing units. Instead, the system announced on Tuesday will be built with new Nvidia chips that include processor technology from Arm, the company whose technology powers most mobile phones.

Image

An image of Nvidia’s GH200 Grace Hopper A.I. Superchip, which the supercomputer will use.Credit...via Nvidia

The shift is a troubling sign for Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, the dominant microprocessor suppliers. But it is positive news for Arm in its long-running effort to break into data center computers.

[kmaherali]

The company, which has been working to trim expenses, laid off employees who worked on core engineering, the Google Assistant product and hardware such as the Pixel phone.


Google had 182,000 employees as of Sept. 30.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Google laid off hundreds of workers in several divisions Wednesday night, seeking to lower expenses as it focuses on artificial intelligence and joining a wave of other companies cutting tech jobs this year.

The Silicon Valley company laid off employees in its core engineering division, as well as those working on the Google Assistant, a voice-operated virtual assistant, and in the hardware division that makes the Pixel phone, Fitbit watches and Nest thermostat, three people with knowledge of the cuts said.

Several hundred employees from the company’s core engineering organization lost corporate access and received notices that their roles were eliminated, two of the people said. Google said that most of the hardware cuts affected a team working on augmented reality, technology that combines the real world with a digital overlay.

“We’ve had to make some difficult decisions about ongoing employment of some Google employees and we regret to inform you that your position is being eliminated,” the company told some workers in the division, according to the text of an email reviewed by The New York Times.

Google confirmed the Assistant cuts, earlier reported by Semafor, and the hardware layoffs, earlier reported by the blog 9to5Google.

“We’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” a Google spokesman said in a statement. After cuts throughout the second half of 2023, “some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some role eliminations globally.”

The cuts continue a trend of tech layoffs, after large companies such as Google, Meta and Amazon laid off thousands of workers last year. Ten days into this year, more companies have announced job cuts. Earlier Wednesday, Amazon shed hundreds of workers from its Twitch streaming service, Prime Video and MGM studios. Xerox said this month that it would cut 15 percent of its 23,000-person staff, and the video game software provider Unity Software said it would eliminate 1,800 roles, or 25 percent of its work force.

At Google, Sundar Pichai, the chief executive, has pushed the company since July 2022 to sharpen its focus and to reduce expenses as global economic conditions deteriorated. In January 2023, Google shed 6 percent of its work force, or 12,000 people, in the largest layoffs that the company has conducted. Since then, executives at the company have said they would try to significantly reduce costs, as it focuses on the growing field of generative artificial intelligence.

Google, which had 182,000 employees as of Sept. 30, said the layoffs on Wednesday were part of a set of reorganizations that were made in the normal course of business.

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Unstoppable in Red
The Alphabet Workers Union, a group representing more than 1,400 workers at Google’s parent company, Alphabet, described the layoffs as “needless.”

“Our members and teammates work hard every day to build great products for our users, and the company cannot continue to fire our co-workers while making billions every quarter,” the group said in a post on the social media site X.

[kmaherali]

Not long ago, China’s economy was the envy of the world. Now a new generation of aspiring professionals is facing the toughest job market in years.



THEY KNEW the job market would be tough. None were prepared for just how tough it proved to be.

China’s economy is struggling through a sustained slowdown, with real estate developers mired in debt, families fearful of spending and entrepreneurs hesitating to take risks. Joblessness levels among young people have hit record highs.

We spoke to five young Chinese about what it took to find their jobs amid such uncertainty. They described moving home with their parents, exhausting their savings, taking on unpaid internships or working two jobs.

They also spoke of a generational disillusionment. Born in the headiest years of China’s economic boom, they grew up with more opportunities and more comforts than their parents — and also higher expectations. They were told that, with hard work and the right education, their futures were all but guaranteed.

Now, those boom years are fading, as are many young people’s hopes — with unpredictable consequences for China and the world.

More...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Job cuts, which could continue throughout the year, have created a glum mood at what was arguably Silicon Valley’s most exuberant workplace.


The Google offices in Cambridge, Mass., were hit by layoffs last year.Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times

When Diane Hirsh Theriault’s co-worker returned from lunch to Google’s Cambridge, Mass., office one afternoon in October, his work badge couldn’t open a turnstile. He quickly realized it was a sign that he had been laid off.

Dr. Hirsh Theriault soon learned that most of her fellow Google News engineers in Cambridge had also lost their jobs. More than 40 people in the news division were cut, a union at the company said, though a number of them were later offered jobs elsewhere inside Google.

Dr. Hirsh Theriault’s experience is increasingly common at Google, where rolling job cuts in recent months, after a year of significant layoffs, have employees on edge. The layoffs have slowed down projects and prompted employees to spend working hours trying to learn which work groups have been hit and who could be next, said 10 current and former Google employees, including some who asked for anonymity so they could speak candidly about their jobs.

What’s more, the layoffs have shifted the narrative that long defined working at Google — that it was more of a tinker’ community than a workaday office, where creativity and thinking out of the box was encouraged. That it was a fun, different kind of place to work.

ImageDiane Hirsh Theriault in a burgundy jacket over a flowered shirt sits on a blue couch.

Diane Hirsh Theriault, a software engineer for Google News. She wrote in a post on LinkedIn that “the buildings are half empty at 4:30.”Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times

Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said more than a year ago that the company would cull 12,000 jobs, or 6 percent of the work force, describing it as “a difficult decision to set us up for the future.”

Those cuts have trickled into this year in what Mr. Pichai said could be much smaller, rolling layoffs throughout the year. Since early January, the company has cut more than a thousand jobs, affecting its ad sales division, YouTube and employees working on the company’s voice-operated assistant.

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has said it is trying to shed expenses to pay for its growing investment in artificial intelligence. And Google is trying to reduce layers of bureaucracy so that employees can focus on the biggest company priorities, said Courtenay Mencini, a Google spokeswoman. The company added that it was not conducting a companywide layoff, and that reorganizations were part of the normal course of business.

“The reality is that to create the capacity for this investment, we have to make tough choices,” Mr. Pichai wrote in a note to employees on Jan. 17. For some divisions, “this means reorganizing and, in some cases, eliminating roles.” Teams could still cut additional roles throughout the year, he added.

Image
Sundar Pichai, wearing a dark suit and white shirt, holds up his hand to cameras.

Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, sent an email to employees last year that described the 12,000 job cuts as “a difficult decision to set us up for the future.”Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Employees say the workplace mood has turned glum. While Google has shifted into overdrive to develop artificial intelligence products and keep pace with competitors like Microsoft and the start-up OpenAI, some of the humans that build the company’s technology feel less important.

Now “the buildings are half empty at 4:30,” Dr. Hirsh Theriault wrote in a LinkedIn post. “I know a lot of people, myself included, who used to happily do extra work evenings and weekends to get the demo done or just out of boredom. That’s gone.”

Google’s layoffs have been smaller than those at some other big tech companies like Meta. And as a percentage of the company’s total work force, they are far smaller than recent cuts at companies like Xerox and the livestreaming platform Twitch. Google’s full-time work force was 182,502 at the end of 2023, just 4 percent smaller than at the end of 2022. On Tuesday, the company said it had a $20.7 billion profit in the last quarter of 2023, up 52 percent from a year earlier.

But Google’s job cuts have accompanied broader changes in how the company operated as it reshuffled work groups and removed management layers. Workers complain that reorganization has been chaotically carried out and poorly communicated.

Image
A reflective image through a window of people seated looking at computers. The word Google is in reverse at the top of the window.

Google’s layoffs have been smaller than those at some other big tech companies but the cuts have accompanied broader changes in how the company operates.Credit...George Etheredge for The New York Times

When YouTube laid off one of its vendor manager teams, which are responsible for approving purchase orders so that content moderation firms get paid, the company did not notify other groups that rely on the team, one person said, though some of the workers were offered the chance to get their jobs back.

When layoffs resumed in January, a Google worker in Switzerland started an internal document for employees to track the job cuts since the company has said little to them about where it is making the cuts. The document has become an essential source of information, employees said, along with news reports, social media and the old-fashioned office rumor mill.

“From an H.R. standpoint, this is a nightmare,” said Meghan M. Biro, whose firm, TalentCulture, creates content about best practices in human resources. “It completely reverses their image as a desirable employer.”

Google said leaders had communicated clearly to teams when they were undergoing changes.

Workers warned in interviews that some of the cuts could prove disruptive to parts of the business already struggling to complete thorny tasks. In January, Google cut hundreds of employees from its core engineering organization, responsible for its infrastructure and tools used across the company.

One of the core division’s main priorities is helping Google comply with the European Digital Markets Act when the law goes into effect on March 6. The law will make tech giants show consumers their choices for online services, such as web browsers, and force them to get consent to share user data within the company. But employees working on the efforts fear that the company is behind schedule and that it could be difficult for Google to be in full compliance by the deadline, two people with knowledge of the matter said.

Google said it had already started rolling out consent screens to European users in January and expected to introduce more changes ahead of the deadline. It added that the recent job reductions in its core division would not affect the timing.

Image
Rupert Breheny, wearing a brightly colored T-shirt and black leather jacket, stands in front of a Google sign.

Rupert Breheny, who spent 16 years at Google, mostly in Zurich, was laid off last summer. “The thing that took you to Google was passion,” he said.Credit...Clara Tuma for The New York Times

Google employees were for a long time encouraged to work on experimental projects. But doing something experimental has over the last year proved to be risky, said four workers who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The company has all but shuttered Area 120, its in-house incubator that tried to develop new products and services, and altered the strategy of X, a “moonshot factory” that tried to build new companies.

Google said employees were constantly doing “extraordinarily innovative, ambitious things across the company.”

Employees are more reluctant to ask for the so-called 20 percent, or side, projects, which used to be a way to explore an idea outside their regular work that they found compelling, five people said. That was a regrettable shift for Rupert Breheny, who spent 16 years at Google, mostly in Zurich, working on products like Google Street View in Maps.

“The thing that took you to Google was passion,” said Mr. Breheny, who was laid off last summer. “You could have fun making stuff. It stayed like that for a long time.”


https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/tech ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Construction Industry Grapples With Its Top Killer: Drug Overdose
Construction workers are more likely to die of overdose than workers in any other occupation, forcing the industry to rethink its approach to safety.


Workers at the construction site of One Madison in Manhattan listening to a presentation on drug overdose and prevention.Credit...Andres Kudacki for The New York Times

At One Madison, a high-rise under construction on 23rd Street in Manhattan, workers face dangers daily: live wires, electrical hazards, heavy machinery. Cold gusts of wind whip around them as they lay concrete and operate forklifts. Access to the upper floors of the 28-story building is a ride on a noisy construction elevator.

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City and federal officials visited the site recently to give a safety presentation, but they weren’t there to remind workers how to avoid falls or injuries. They were showing workers how to prevent the biggest killer in the industry: drug overdose.

“We ask you to do things based on getting home at the end of the day,” Brian Crain, a compliance assistance specialist at the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, told a crowd of over 100 workers in hard hats. “Addiction works the same way,” he said.

Construction workers already had the highest on-the-job death toll of any industry. Now they are more likely to die of overdose than those in any other line of work, according to a new analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That disparity stems in part from addictive medication workers are prescribed to manage pain from injuries, which are common because of the physical nature of the work.

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Men wearing hoodies and backpacks head up an escalator.

Workers in construction are more likely to die of overdose than those in any other line of work.Credit...Andres Kudacki for The New York Times

It’s an issue that the industry — which is already trying to protect its workers from falls, electrocutions and chemical hazards — has struggled to get a handle on for more than a decade. The presentation at One Madison in November was just one example of how the industry has started reckoning with the problem in recent years. Unions now employ full-time addiction and mental health specialists, and workplace safety experts have increasingly had to focus on preventing overdoses.

The industry has the highest death rate attributed to overdose, according to the C.D.C. study, which was published in August. The report, the agency’s most comprehensive examination of overdose deaths by occupation, found that there were more than 162 overdose deaths per 100,000 construction workers in 2020, the most recent year for which data is available. The food service industry, with nearly 118 deaths among the same number of workers, had the second-highest rate.

But in the same year, the number of overall deaths on the job in construction was about 10 workers per 100,000, according to data from the Department of Labor, suggesting that workers were roughly 16 times as likely to die of an overdose as they were from a work-related injury.


“Statistically, this is a bigger threat to construction workers’ health and safety than the actual work,” said Brian Turmail, a spokesman at the Associated General Contractors, a construction industry trade group.

The industry mirrors demographics vulnerable to addiction: A majority of construction workers are men, who are more likely than women to die of overdoses overall. Hispanic people are overrepresented in the construction industry and have a rising overdose mortality rate overall.

The industry is often rife with casual substance use, said Aaron Walsh, an addiction recovery specialist with the St. Louis Laborers’ health and welfare fund. Mr. Walsh, who is in recovery for drug addiction, is one of two people the union employs full time to help members struggling with drug addiction.

“It’s pretty prevalent in our population,” he said.

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A man wearing a hard hat puts on safety gloves at a construction site while other men in safety gear linger nearby.

Construction workers, already accustomed to wearing safety gear to prevent falls and injuries, must now learn how to prevent drug overdose on the job.Credit...Andres Kudacki for The New York Times

Injuries in construction are more common than in other fields. The job is often stressful and hard on workers’ bodies, making them susceptible to injury and more likely to seek medical attention for pain relief.

In many cases, workers carry heavy tool bags on their shoulders and spend long periods bent down or on their knees. A third of construction workers have muscle or bone ailments, which make them three times as likely to be prescribed opioids for pain. They also do not often get paid sick leave, which could make opioids an option for getting back to work quickly.

Brendan Loftus knows that experience firsthand. In 1998, he fell down an elevator shaft at a construction site. He learned that he had a spinal injury while in the emergency room but decided to not manage his pain with opioids because he had already overcome an opioid addiction. He was getting married in a month, so against medical advice, he returned to work after only two weeks. “I had a wedding to pay for,” Mr. Loftus said.

Construction work tends to be cyclical, adding to the pressure to work whenever possible. Once one project is done, a worker may not know when the next one will come. Wayne Russell, 32, a construction worker from New Jersey, has been out of work since November.

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Two men in hard hats shovel gravel from the back of a dump truck while a third man hauls the gravel away in a wheelbarrow.

Construction work is hard on the body: A third of workers have muscle or bone ailments.Credit...Andres Kudacki for The New York Times

“Money can stop coming in, but your bills don’t,” he said. Mr. Russell spent some of his time off taking a mental health and addiction course offered by his union, the International Union of Elevator Constructors. At a recent meeting, four of the 10 men in attendance, including Mr. Russell, had struggled with substance abuse.

Mr. Loftus, who now provides addiction services for members of the International Union of Elevator Constructors, said that his union had begun to notice that the overdose problem was getting severe in 2015 when it lost five members to overdoses in 11 months, and that the problem had gotten only worse.

“If we had lost five members to on-the-job fatalities, people would be picketing in the streets,” Mr. Loftus said. “But nobody wanted to talk about this, because it was a dirty little secret.”

One of the first members Mr. Loftus helped with recovery was Michael Cruz, a 25-year-old construction worker who had an opioid addiction.

In October 2016, Mr. Cruz had just bought building supplies at Home Depot for an upcoming job when Mr. Loftus invited him to dinner. Mr. Cruz had recently checked out of a 30-day rehab program and was eager to get back to work. He was particularly excited about the next project because it would be the first he would be able to work on from start to finish.

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A framed picture of young man wearing a black suit and a striped gold tie being held by a woman wearing black.

Lizbeth Rodas holding a photo of her brother, Michael Cruz, a construction worker who died of a drug overdose.Credit...Andres Kudacki for The New York Times

Mr. Cruz declined the dinner invitation. Later that night, he was found at his aunt’s apartment in Queens, N.Y., dead of an apparent overdose, lying next to a bag with the measuring tape and other supplies he had bought that evening.

Mr. Loftus was the last person to speak to Mr. Cruz. “That’s how it happens,” he said. “It’s that fast.”

Across the country, overdose deaths are on the rise. That is in part because many who are addicted to prescription painkillers may turn to street drugs like fentanyl and other potent synthetic opioids, which health officials say are often mixed with other stimulants. The pharmaceutical industry has been widely accused of profiting off the nation’s opioid crisis, which killed nearly 645,000 people from 1999 to 2021, according to the C.D.C.

Mr. Cruz’s addiction started with painkillers that he had been prescribed after a car accident left him with lingering back pain. Eight years later, he had just earned his first paycheck after checking out of rehab when he died.

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Ms. Rodas, wearing a green dress, looks out a window of her home.

“He was hiding it well enough,” Ms. Rodas said of her brother’s addiction.Credit...Andres Kudacki for The New York Times

“He was hiding it well enough,” his sister, Lizbeth Rodas, said at her home in Morristown, N.J., which was adorned with framed family photos, including two of her brother. She described Mr. Cruz as both a jokester and a gentleman who was like a brother to her children. “We thought he was cured, and everything was back to normal.”

Ms. Rodas’s husband and son both work in construction. Two years ago, when one of her sons was in a car accident, he was prescribed OxyContin for the pain. Ms. Rodas said she had begged him not to take it, and he complied.

“It was so scary for me, to think of going through the same thing again,” she said.

Mr. Cruz’s toxicology report showed traces of codeine, fentanyl and heroin in his system. Mr. Loftus, the union counselor, said most workers addicted to substances like heroin had been addicted to prescription painkillers first. Among workers’ compensation claims with at least one prescription, about one-fourth had one for an opioid, according to data from 40 states gathered by the National Council on Compensation Insurance.

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Two workers wearing safety vests and hard hats on a roof with construction material.

The construction industry is already trying to protect its workers from falls, electrocutions and chemical hazards. Credit...Andres Kudacki for The New York Times

Part of the challenge the industry faces is breaking the stigma of addiction. Ms. Rodas said that when she and her family were preparing Mr. Cruz’s funeral, they were unsure whether they should tell people he died of an overdose. Per their mother’s wishes, they chose to tell the truth.

“So many people came forward after that,” she said, including union colleagues.

Tackling such a pervasive issue is a gargantuan task for the industry’s safety leaders, who are used to protecting workers from physical injuries. Increasingly, construction companies are stocking job sites with Narcan, a brand name for the opioid overdose reversal medication naloxone.

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A close-up of a Narcan inhaler, standing on concrete.

Developers are increasingly keeping opioid reversal medications like Narcan on construction sites.Credit...Andres Kudacki for The New York Times

“It’s not just about the physical safety of the workers on our job sites, it’s also what goes on when they’re not on the construction site,” said Rebecca Severson, director of safety at Gilbane Building Company, one of many that have started adding Narcan to its first-aid kits.

The Center for Construction Research and Training, a nonprofit created by a federation of construction unions, has sponsored research projects on the effectiveness of various mitigation measures, including having Narcan on job sites and offering workers paid sick leave.

Chris Trahan Cain, the center’s executive director, has decades of experience making construction jobs safer. She is an expert on chemical exposure, which is a vital concern in an industry where workers can often handle materials containing asbestos and lead.

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A worker with a safety vest and hard hat on is seen through a subway train window.

Construction workers often do not have access to paid sick leave, and every day out of work with an injury is a day without getting paid.Credit...Andres Kudacki for The New York Times

Ms. Cain did not initially see preventing overdoses as a particularly integral part of her job. Now, it is the most acute safety issue in her field. Since 2018, she has led the group’s response to the overdose crisis ravaging the construction industry.

“As I was preparing to create this task force, I cried,” Ms. Cain said. “It’s really beyond my scope of expertise.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/08/busi ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

The A.I. Economy Makes Our Humanity More Important Than Ever



There have been just a handful of moments over the centuries when we have experienced a huge shift in the skills our economy values most. We are entering one such moment now. Technical and data skills that have been highly sought after for decades appear to be among the most exposed to advances in artificial intelligence. But other skills, particularly the people skills that we have long undervalued as “soft,” will very likely remain the most durable. That is a hopeful sign that A.I. could usher in a world of work that is anchored more, not less, around human ability.

A moment like this compels us to think differently about how we are training our workers, especially the heavy premium we have placed on skills like coding and data analysis that continue to reshape the fields of higher education and worker training. The early signals of what A.I. can do should compel us to think differently about ourselves as a species. Our abilities to effectively communicate, develop empathy and think critically have allowed humans to collaborate, innovate and adapt for millenniums. Those skills are ones we all possess and can improve, yet they have never been properly valued in our economy or prioritized in our education and training. That needs to change.

In today’s knowledge economy, many students are focused on gaining technical skills because those skills are seen as the most competitive when it comes to getting a good job. And for good reason. For decades, we have viewed those jobs as “future-proof” given the growth of technology companies and the fact that engineering majors land the highest-paying jobs.

The number of students seeking four-year degrees in computer science and information technology shot up 41 percent between the spring of 2018 and the spring of 2023, while the number of humanities majors plummeted. Workers who didn’t go to college and those who needed additional skills and wanted to take advantage of a lucrative job boom flocked to dozens of coding boot camps and online technical programs.

Now comes the realization of the power of generative A.I., with its vast capabilities in skills like writing, programming and translation (Microsoft, which owns LinkedIn, is a major investor in the technology). LinkedIn researchers recently looked at which skills any given job requires and then identified over 500 likely to be affected by generative A.I. technologies. They then estimated that 96 percent of a software engineer’s current skills — mainly proficiency in programming languages — can eventually be replicated by A.I. Skills associated with jobs like legal associates and finance officers will also be highly exposed.

In fact, given the broad impact A.I. is set to have, it is quite likely to affect all of our work to some degree or another.

We believe there will be engineers in the future, but they will most likely spend less time coding and more time on tasks like collaboration and communication. We also believe that there will be new categories of jobs that emerge as a result of A.I.’s capabilities — just like we’ve seen in past moments of technological advancement — and that those jobs will probably be anchored increasingly around people skills.

Circling around this research is the big question emerging across so many conversations about A.I. and work, namely: What are our core capabilities as humans?

If we answer that question from a place of fear about what’s left for people in the age of A.I., we can end up conceding a diminished view of human capability. Instead, it’s critical for us all to start from a place that imagines what’s possible for humans in the age of A.I. When you do that, you find yourself focusing quickly on people skills that allow us to collaborate and innovate in ways technology can amplify but never replace. And you find yourself — whatever the role or career stage you’re in — with agency to better manage this moment of historic change.

Communication is already the most in-demand skill across jobs on LinkedIn today. Even experts in A.I. are observing that the skills we need to work well with A.I. systems, such as prompting, are similar to the skills we need to communicate and reason effectively with other people.

Over 70 percent of executives at LinkedIn last year said soft skills were more important to their organizations than highly technical A.I. skills. And a recent Jobs for the Future survey found that 78 percent of the 10 top-employing occupations classify uniquely human skills and tasks as “important” or “very important.” These are skills like building interpersonal relationships, negotiating between parties and guiding and motivating teams.

Now is the time for leaders, across sectors, to develop new ways for students to learn that are more directly, and more dynamically, tied to where our economy is going, not where it has been. Critically, that involves bringing the same level of rigor to training around people skills that we have brought to technical skills.

Colleges and universities have a critical role to play. Over the past few decades, we have seen a prioritization of science and engineering, often at the expense of the humanities. That calibration will need to be reconsidered.

Those not pursuing a four-year degree should look for those training providers that have long emphasized people skills and are invested in social capital development.

Employers will need to be educators, not just around A.I. tools but also on people skills and people-to-people collaboration. Major employers like Walmart and American Airlines are already exploring ways to put A.I. in the hands of employees so they can spend less time on routine tasks and more time on personal engagement with customers.

Ultimately, for our society, this comes down to whether we believe in the potential of humans with as much conviction as we believe in the potential of A.I. If we do, it is entirely possible to build a world of work that is not only more human but is also a place where all people are valued for the unique skills they have, enabling us to deliver new levels of human achievement across so many areas that affect all of our lives, from health care to transportation to education. Along the way, we could meaningfully increase equity in our economy, in part by addressing the persistent gender gap that exists when we undervalue skills that women bring to work at a higher percentage than men.

Almost anticipating this exact moment a few years ago, Minouche Shafik, who is now the president of Columbia University, said: “In the past, jobs were about muscles. Now they’re about brains, but in the future, they’ll be about the heart.”

The knowledge economy that we have lived in for decades emerged out of a goods economy that we lived in for millenniums, fueled by agriculture and manufacturing. Today, the knowledge economy is giving way to a relationship economy, where people skills and social abilities are going to become even more core to success than ever before. That possibility is not just cause for new thinking when it comes to work force training. It is also cause for greater imagination when it comes to what is possible for us as humans, not simply as individuals and organizations but as a species.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/14/opin ... 778d3e6de3