Will AI make or take the next billion jobs? | The Development Podcast
The Development Podcast
The episode explores whether artificial intelligence will act as a job creator or destroyer for the 1.2 billion young people entering the wo
Key takeaways
- Marina Mogilko introduces 'vibe coding,' allowing non-developers to use AI to build functional tools like dashboards.
- The World Bank Group projects a potential gap of 800 million jobs for the incoming wave of young workers in emerging markets.
Main topics
- AI impact on global employment
- Emerging market economic opportunities
Notable quotes
AI isn't a threat. It's leverage.
Conclusion
While AI presents significant disruption to traditional roles, the epi
Transcript preview
Speaker 4 (0:00) Hello, everyone. Over the next decade, more than a billion young people will enter the workforce in emerging markets. And the World Bank Group president, Ajay Banga, has talked a lot about a potential demographic dividend. If enough jobs are created for these young people, it's growth, prosperity that could benefit everyone. That's with the right foundations, of course, in place. If you get it wrong, the future doesn't look so bright. And just as that wave hits, Artificial intelligence explodes. Machines that write, code, diagnose, design can change everything. Which brings us to the real question. Will AI take the next billion jobs or help create them? Speaker 2 (0:47) Let's begin by heading to Nairobi, Kenya, Speaker 4 (0:49) also known as the Silicon Savannah. iHub is an innovation and hacker space for the tech community. So what do people there think about the future of jobs and AI? Speaker 6 (1:01) Work that probably used to take us a week, now you can do in an hour. Speaker 5 (1:07) AI sometimes helps me to move faster. It helps me to do administrative duties or duties that you can automate. I Speaker 6 (1:14) see it more of replacing tasks and not really jobs. Speaker 5 (1:18) And leave room for me to be a strategic thinker. Speaker 6 (1:21) However, we are starting to see once the AI becomes really, really smart, people losing their jobs because after they train the AI, they eventually are training the AI to replace them from the job. As much as you can do a lot of stuff with AI, it can never be a substitute for human interaction. So I don't think it's going to take my job as long as people still exist and people still need that human connection. AI has taken over the conversation. So people, even when you look at products, they have to insert that my solution is AI powered, but they're not really focusing on the use case of the problem AI solves. So this kind of creates a dependency or rather a hype that people are jumping onto. as opposed to thinking of ways how this can help, especially in a continent like Africa, for us to solve our basic problems. It is more about intuition than calculation. Personally, I don't think AI will replace me. AI will actually amplify human creativity and actually not replace it. Speaker 5 (2:22) It enables us or it challenges us to think about the ethics of AI, how to use it for the common good, you know, how to maximize on it and then also how to think about putting guardrails. I Speaker 6 (2:33) think for the people sitting in positions of power and Speaker 6 (2:39) influence, we need to know how to support the youth, especially in Africa, because we are going to have a billion new people coming into the job market. Speaker 4 (2:51) So before we debate policy, before we panic, let's spot the opportunity with our very first guest on the show, Marina Mogilko. Also known to millions as the Silicon Valley girl, has built businesses, media platforms, and a global audience around just one idea. AI isn't a threat. It's leverage. Marina, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for joining us. I want to start off by understanding a bit about your own experience in trying to understand the future of AI and its impact on jobs. You had an insightful conversation with Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn a while ago. who's brought on his own AI avatar onto the platform. What was one thing you learned from him? First of all, thank you so much for Speaker 3 (3:37) having me on your podcast. And thank you for bringing up one of my favorite conversations on Silicon Valley Girl. His thing is that more and more people are going to deploy AI and they will need people who know how to code. But the way I understand it, you know, we have this team of 35 people. We're in this media company. Podcast is part of it. And of course, I want to deploy AI. But I asked myself, do I really need like a developer who is, you know, understands code deeply? And I realized that with current tools, one of our producers could actually learn how to vibe code into dashboards of a basic stuff. I feel like anyone can spend a few weeks learning vibe coding and. they could start helping companies integrate AI. And the way we think about hiring these days is that we're not hiring just a person. We're hiring a person and their AI stack that comes with it. Back in the day, I would have to hire a few people, teach them how to do that. Now, I'd ideally take a customer support consultant that's going to come with his AI agents, his whole system set up, and I'm going to pay a fraction of what I would have paid five years ago. to have an amazing customer service run by, you know, partly human, partly AI. It's just things are becoming much more accessible for small and medium businesses. And I see this as a huge opportunity for people who Speaker 4 (5:05) want to build something. And specifically to your business, do you see AI as a threat or an opportunity for content creators? I'm already hearing of AI anchors being launched by traditional news agencies, which is a bit worrying. I think it's both. I think it's Speaker 3 (5:22) a great opportunity, also a threat from the perspective that we're getting flooded by content, right? Five years ago, in order to create a piece of content, you needed, well, you just needed a phone, but also you needed an idea. And if it's like a talking head piece of content or even a written content for LinkedIn, you needed to put in a lot of work to come up with the idea, to put it in the right words. Now you basically ask your chat GPT. Good thing is we have algorithms and if it's AI slop, it's not going to get promoted. A great piece of content created by AI actually requires hours and hours of human work. So I feel like AI is empowering people to create content and not only people who are maybe like well-spoken or have a good camera, but also people who are just good at prompting and describing their idea to AI. And it's still a lot of work. So do creators, can creators get more efficient? Yes. Do you need to start using AI to Speaker 4 (6:25) compete with them? Absolutely. You know, Marina, your LinkedIn profile says that you're helping ambitious people worldwide go from passion to profit. Speaker 3 (6:35) How Speaker 4 (6:36) so? Going from passion Speaker 3 (6:37) to profit is actually my personal story. I was born and raised in Russia and my biggest passion was English. I was able to go. for two weeks to the UK to learn English. It was part of the exchange program that my school ran. And it was the most transformative experience in my life. And I kept thinking, how can I make it business? I didn't want to become a teacher, though I seriously considered that. But I'm like, I really want this study abroad experience to be available to more people. And this is how I started my company, helping people learn languages abroad. I feel like the best thing you can do in your life is just follow your passion and think about different ways you can monetize it. So that's my mission, to empower people to think about what they love most and these days use AI Speaker 4 (7:22) tools to make it a reality. But Marina, how do you follow your passion when your passion is being disrupted by AI? As an Speaker 3 (7:29) English language enthusiast, I can totally see how I can ask my chat GPT to teach me whatever, Italian, I also speak German. But at the same time, there is nothing that really replaces the experience of going and staying with a local family. Interacting in this language is a different type