I use AI tools every day – and am starting to think about paying for one of them. Which leads me to wonder about artificial intelligence companies and social responsibility.
In the brave new world of artificial intelligence, there are small questions and big questions.
Small questions are things like: what is the best AI tool to use to do a specific task?
Big questions are sometimes philosophical: “will AI make human beings too lazy to think for themselves?” is one I hear a lot.
A big question that occupies my mind might at first seem a little off-base: what happened to the wood engravers and the people who shovelled horse manure?
The future of work
These two groups of people were used as examples in presentations about the future of work at an AI conference I attended. The idea was this: the invention of the printing press took away the wood engravers’ jobs. And motor cars took away the jobs of the people who cleaned manure deposited on the streets by the horses rapidly going out of fashion as a means of transport.
I’ve seen a fair few presentations like this, and what always happens is that the presenter then says triumphantly: but that new technology created lots more jobs!
The thing that always strikes me is that these conference presenters are technically advanced developers and marketers and CEOs of venture-funded startups. They have first-world education and ubiquitous internet access and always-on electricity. And I’d wager that few of them have any idea that they live in a rarefied world.
When they say “yes jobs will be lost but ta-dah, there will be more!!!!”, they are thinking about their own jobs and their own colleagues and their own corners of the world. They are not thinking about the global ramifications at all.
Not all jobs are the same
It seems obvious to say that not all jobs and job-seekers and tasks and skills levels are the same. But the obvious must be stated, it seems: if one job is lost in (say) wood engraving, it does not mean that a job for that person automatically becomes available on a new-fangled printing press.
It’s quite possible that that person – that one, singular individual – now finds themselves with no income, three children to feed and the rent due on Friday.
It is these singular individuals who are not considered in the sweeping generalisations about job losses and gains in the AI revolution.
If we must do generalizations, though
I give you this table from the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs report:
The report surveyed more than 1,000 companies around the world – representing 22 industry clusters and more than 14 million workers – and found that the fastest growing jobs are big data specialists, FinTech engineers and AI and machine learning specialists. Fastest declining jobs? Postal service clerks, bank tellers and data entry clerks. Of course, it’s not a given that there’s a direct correlation between AI and the slowing growth of clerical jobs, but it does seem a common sense conclusion to draw.
Two questions arise:
One: Say a bank teller’s job is lost and their work is replaced by an AI agent. Does the person have the skills or the education to reinvent themselves as a data specialist, or a FinTech engineer. Or, if you take the 15th fastest growing job, a renewable energy engineer? In fact, try to come up with any job in the modern world that an unemployed bank teller or postal clerk can do without finding ways to learn new skills, or having the money to start a business. What are the chances they have the resources to do either of those things?
Two: What happens when many people’s jobs are taken by AI, or when job prospects become smaller and smaller across a band of society? In particular, what happens in societies and countries where employment is already under threat? For instance, call centres provide entry level jobs for South African school-leavers. If available call-centre positions diminish because AI chatbots are taking the slack, those school-leavers become job seekers in an economy in which unemployment among young people aged 15 to 24 sits at a staggering 60%. It seems to me there are risks of unrest and social disruption here (not to mention the despair felt by all those singular, individual people).
What are we to do about this?
I don’t think this means that we stop using AI (any more than the printing press should have been banned). But when people trot out this well-worn LinkedIn platitude: “You won’t lose your job to AI. You’ll lose your job to someone using AI”, look closely at the person who is saying it.
They are not likely to be a call centre employee with a matric certificate and a family to feed because they find themselves the head of a household at the age of 22. That person will also not be hanging on by a thread, hoping for a job to take them off the poverty line. They will almost certainly not be living in the Global South, which appears to be invisible to many in the developed world.
When you can, challenge the “jobs will be made by AI” statements. What jobs, and where, and suitable for who? What skills will be needed to do those jobs? How are people living in marginalised communities expected to gain those skills?
Being an informed consumer
For myself, I’ve decided to ask some questions about the companies who make generative AI tools. As far as I can in the rest of my life, I try to use products from ethical and responsible companies. I don’t think that big business has any real imperative to take responsibility for its actions (we do, sadly, live in late-stage capitalism) but I do think those that do are taking a long-term view about sustainability. And I care about sustainability.
So perhaps that lens needs to be applied to these new kids on the block, and some of the older giant tech companies who have jumped on the bandwagon? Get beyond the hype and start to assess them as we would any other company?
I’ve been contemplating starting a monthly subscription to one of the AI tools that I am now using for free. I’ve been trying to figure out which one offers the best bang for my buck. Now I’m thinking: what questions do I need to be asking about the companies that provide these products? These issues spring to mind immediately: does the company have a position on:
· the social and economic disruption that they are likely to cause because of job displacement? Are they investing in reskilling programmes?
· the accessibility of their tools to people in the Global South / developing economies
· their impact on the environment
Using those questions as a prism, is it possible to figure out which of the generative AI tools we should support with our hard-earned money, and which we should use with caution, and which we should be actively boycotting?
Launching the progressive shopper’s guide to generative AI
I’m going to research this question over the next two weeks, initially just using the tools I would apply to any consumer research (What does the corporate website say? Any recent news articles? Social media?). Findings will be in my next blog post. For now, I’d welcome any comments you have on these questions:
Are there other prisms through which we ought to be looking at AI companies?
And which companies should I look at? For now, I have a list of the big ones – are there any you’d like me to add? I’ve deliberately stayed away from niche tools – but if there is one you use, I’l love it if you check it out and let me know if it has any public statements on any of these issues. My list:
ChatGPT and DALL-3 – OpenAI
Claude – Anthropic
Gemini / Google search – Google (Alphabet)
Copilot / Bing – Microsoft
Grok 3 – xAI
Meta AI (I’ve never used their tools, but hey; we need to look at Zuckerberg)
For my own purposes, because I use them a lot, I’m also looking at Perplexity (an independent start-up) and Canva AI.
* That’s it for this week. If you have comments on my research or if there’s a question you’d like me to answer, or a topic you’d like covered, contact me here. I can’t promise to answer everything (especially deeply technical questions), but I can generally get us all pointed in the right direction.
Other things I have written
Musings on the meaning of work | Safe Hands
Colonisers and colonised – the shadows of the past | Safe Hands
You can’t have it all – but why do you want it? | Safe Hands
Nope, you can’t have everything (and that means everyone) | Safe Hands
Main picture: Head Office typists’ room, New Zealand Railways, 1959. Archives New Zealand, Flickr (Licence: CC BY 2.0)
World Economic Forum image used under the Creative Commons licence specified here.
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