Is AI Subtly Nudging You Out Of Your Job?: The Rise Of Silent Firing

So, 2021 and 2022 were considered to be the years of The Great Resignation. 2023 was deemed to be the year of The Great Layoffs. It may have been this way to some degree before COVID-19, but after the pandemic, it seems like the workplace of the 2020s enjoys upheaval. Besides these trends, there was also quiet quitting and rage applying.?And how about 2024? Just as the modern workplace thought it could breathe a sigh of relief, yet another trend rears its head: silent firing.

If there’s a technology that seems to have dominated the 2020s so far, it’s probably generative AI. India, especially, seems to be having fun with the burgeoning tech. According to a recent BCG report, India has the highest ChatGPT usage with 45%, which is said to be driven by its IT sector. And if the employers have realized how transformational AI could be and how it could cut costs, maybe, the?employees aren’t looking too sweet anymore. So, what could the employee do? More mass layoffs? The general public won’t look too kindly on the company for going the layoff route for the sake of profit or growth. A more devious way would be to make working conditions?so unbearable, challenging and demoralizing that the employee quits on their own. That bolsters the employer to, then, make room for automation to take over. It’s funny, a couple of years ago, allowing AI to take over would have sounded insidious, but now, it might be part of the status quo.

Of course, trying to nudge people out the door isn’t really a new phenomenon,?but its modern incarnation might be a different purpose than usual with a sharper edge. Even if an employee is high-performing, suddenly, they might find themselves walking on quicksand, unsure of why they no longer matter and not realizing it’s because they’re human beings with human functions, like sleep.?In a way, it’s choosing machines over people. It’s the possible reality that AI is encroaching on human jobs.

Someone who’s being silently fired might notice their responsibilities being reduced or reassigned,?promotions could be withheld, employees could become The Invisible Chirag, raises could be denied, feedback and communication dwindling and more. A direct termination may mean severance packages. One instance of this might be Amazon, which was said to have a RTO (Return-To-Office) policy with a five-day in-office workweek. That might not sound totally terrible to some, but that’s something that might have pushed close to 75% of surveyed workers to consider leaving. That might not necessarily constitute harsh working conditions, but people might have gotten comfortable working from home. Yet, Amazon may be cognizant of the notion that asking workers to return to office might make them leave.

Though, could people be overestimating just how much of employment could be made obsolete with AI? Daron Acemoglu’s?a name you might have seen on economics textbooks and he estimates that only 5% of jobs could be replaced or meaningfully assisted by AI in the next 10 years. Are people overestimating AI’s capabilities and could that lead to wasted investments or economic disruption? Maybe, AI systems might lack some of the reliability and adaptability needed to fully replace human workers.?Remember, when Elon Musk laid off 80% of Twitter’s workforce and later remarked that Twitter would try to rehire some of the fired employees back? Maybe, it’s about repetitive and rote tasks that might require the injection of AI.

There might be a worrying trend of disengagement, especially among young workers. About 30% of surveyed employees may not be engaged with work and it’s said that this disengagement might cost the world close to $9 trillion in productivity. It’s being called “The Great Disengagement”. They keep giving these trends the adjective “great”, but none of them sound too great.

So, is there anything for employees to do to deal with this or is it out of their hands? Is there any degree of upskilling that AI couldn’t replicate? Could employees figure out the limitations of AI to plug those gaps and prove themselves valuable?

What do you think about this? How insulated are you, no matter your position?

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