Will AI make or take the next billion jobs? | The Development Podcast

Tanvir Gill (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?

Let's begin by heading to Nairobi, Kenya, 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_2 (1:02)

Work that probably used to take us a week, now you can do in an hour. AI sometimes helps me to move faster.

SPEAKER_3 (1:10)

It helps me to do administrative duties or duties that you can automate. I see it more of replacing tasks and not really jobs.

SPEAKER_2 (1:18)

And leave room for me to be a strategic thinker. 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.

SPEAKER_4 (1:35)

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.

SPEAKER_3 (1:45)

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.

SPEAKER_2 (2:06)

It is more about intuition than calculation. Personally, I don't think AI will replace me.

SPEAKER_3 (2:16)

AI will actually amplify human creativity and actually not replace it.

SPEAKER_2 (2:22)

It enables us or it challenges us to think about the ethics of AI, how to use it for the common good, how to maximize on it and then also how to think about putting guardrails. I think for the people sitting in positions of power and 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.

Tanvir Gill (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?

Marina Mogilko (3:36)

First of all, thank you so much for having me on your podcast, and thank you for bringing up one of your 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, we have this team of 35 people, we run this media company, podcast is part of it, and of course I want to deploy AI.

But I asked myself, do I really need a developer who understands code deeply?

And I realized that with current tools, one of our producers could actually learn how to vibe code and do dashboards. So for 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 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 want to build something.