Silent fire is the new trend in the workplace. (Representative photo)
The corporate sector has witnessed many trends in the workplace, including grand resignations, quiet retirements, moonlighting, and applying fury. But all of that is expected to be replaced by “silent layoffs,” a trend that has already begun to take over the employment industry. While workers fear that their jobs will be taken over by artificial intelligence (AI) in the future, some experts say it’s already happening. Employers are conducting “silent layoffs” or making roles too demanding, causing employees to quit and then be replaced by AI, the New York Post reported.
George Kailas, CEO of Prospero.Ai and Fast Company contributor, said that Amazon is forcing employees to come into the office five days a week, even though most employees have expressed dissatisfaction with the return-to-office policy. They claim that this is why they are forcing it. As a result, one survey found that 73% of workers had considered quitting, the newspaper reported.
Kailash said that despite some data proving that remote work increases productivity, companies like Amazon are “silently firing employees” by enforcing such policies. That’s because “the best way to reduce retention while saving money on retirement is to eliminate remote work.” I wrote.
“What makes this even more alarming is that we haven’t even scratched the surface of the AI adoption curve,” Kailash added.
Meanwhile, only 5% of jobs will be replaced or supported by AI within the next 10 years, according to economist and MIT professor Daron Acemoglu. “A lot of money will be wasted,” he previously told Bloomberg. “There will be no economic revolution from that 5%.”
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Acemoglu argued that AI cannot yet be trusted to complete tasks performed by humans and predicted that the technology will not advance sufficiently soon. “We need reliable information or the ability of these models to faithfully perform the specific steps that previous workers were performing,” Acemoglu continued.
“If you have human oversight, you can do that in some places, but you don’t have that in most places,” he said.
Concerns have been raised that AI will take over jobs, especially as Gen Z accelerates another workplace trend known as the “Great Detachment.” It refers to a decline in employee engagement due to employee dissatisfaction.
According to Gallup polling data, engagement among Gen Z and younger Millennials is down 5%, and American Staffing Association CEO Richard Wahlquist told Business Insider that engagement among an estimated 3 in 10 employees overall is down 5%. He said people are not actively engaged in work.
