AI and Jobs: Ethical dilemmas and fears vs reality?

The world’s leading tech executives are competing in a race for the ages - who can make the best, most advanced AI and who can do it first? Yet as mere spectators, we are all affected by the results.

In recent weeks, this has made me think of the famous Dr Malcom from Jurassic Park - played by the philosophical Jeff Goldblum. Reflecting on John Hammond’s achievement of bringing back the dinosaurs, he states “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”

Tech founders today are facing their own Jurassic Park moment - not resurrecting dinosaurs, but creating systems whose consequences may outpace their intentions.

Which leads to an interesting point when it comes to one of the issues which will define the next half-millennia; just because we can use AI to automate a job - should we? How will companies react as automation becomes cheaper and more advanced? And will the last human to leave the board room please turn the lights off?

I write this not as a technology sceptic - in fact you’ll see from my work and previous blogs that it’s quite the opposite. I have seen first-hand in business the transformational power that this new technology can bring, and I believe it will continue to enrich our lives for centuries to come.

But these questions do merit further examination and there are far too many to explore on this topic, so let me focus on two. 

1. Is automation already happening, or are companies using it as a cover to respond to economic headwinds?

A useful starting point is to separate reality from narrative. If you listen to earnings calls or read corporate press releases from the past two years, you’ll notice that “AI-driven efficiencies” has become the new corporate catch-all. It conveniently signals innovation, reassures investors, and, crucially, provides a respectable explanation for restructuring decisions that may have happened anyway.

There is genuine automation happening today, particularly in sectors with high volumes of repetitive, rules-based work: customer service, legal discovery, insurance processing, data entry, and parts of software development. We’ve seen large organisations quietly roll out internal copilots that generate emails, accelerate code reviews, or handle simple support tickets. Some of these shifts are real efficiency gains, and companies deserve credit for experimenting with technology that genuinely improves productivity.

But to pretend all corporate downsizing is driven by AI would be disingenuous. Many businesses are still grappling with inflation, higher interest rates, and sluggish consumer demand. For some executives, AI has become a convenient scapegoat; a way to shift responsibility for difficult choices onto an intangible technological force. “We’re restructuring due to AI” sounds far more palatable than “We over-hired” or “We need to protect margins.”

This creates a strange paradox. Publicly, companies frame job cuts as forward-looking, strategic modernisation. Internally, many employees see very little true automation replacing the work that was previously done by humans. In some cases, the remaining staff end up absorbing the same workload, just with fewer colleagues and a chatbot that still apologises for not understanding the question.

We’re therefore witnessing two trends running in parallel:

1.    Real automation, which is incremental, uneven across industries, and often far less dramatic than headlines suggest.

2.    AI-washing, where companies use automation as a narrative shield to justify cost-cutting driven by economic pressure, not technological transformation.

The danger is that this second trend warps public perception. If the public believes that waves of job losses are inevitable and unstoppable, it can feed fear rather than informed debate. And if employees consistently hear “AI took your job” when in reality it was budget constraints or shareholder expectations, trust in both leaders and the technology itself erodes.

Understanding which of these forces is actually at play is essential. Without that clarity, we risk misunderstanding the moment we’re living through and misdiagnosing the challenges that lie ahead.

2.    Should we automate for automation’s sake?

Perhaps the biggest moral question posed by AI is whether it would be right for a company to automate an employee’s job - perhaps a very good employee - just because an AI system would cost less and does not take days off work. 

This of course raises much larger ethical questions beyond the confines of this blog about the moral responsibilities of companies to their employees, the pursuits of profit and shareholder value, to an extent which could fill volumes (and indeed has done so in many historical political texts).

The real dilemma is that AI doesn’t just threaten specific jobs - it threatens the entire career ladder that companies rely on to develop talent.

Many have argued that AI is similar to the industrial revolution’s effect on manufacturing. British ‘luddites’ (as they were known before such a term was used as an insult) claimed the advances of the time, the Spinning Jenny and the Steam Engine would leave millions out of work, permanently, often protesting the loss of jobs by literally destroying new factory equipment. 

Historians debate the lasting impacts of course, but whilst some jobs were lost permanently, the advances in-turn created new jobs and industries. 

But is this a false equivalence with AI? Will AI automation create a new generation of software engineers and robot mechanics? Or is AI something else entirely - are its capabilities theoretically and practically limitless?

And if they are, where does that leave us? IBM’s 1979 Training Manual famously said “A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.”

The argument put forward by some that companies will allow AI to make big decisions, affecting billions of dollars’ worth of share price changes, has little legs, from my perspective. At least for now, AI will be used to mostly inform decisions, using the power of data and in less cases to generate directly, usable suggestions, maybe even be allowed to act a little bit, but within some pre-determined bounds. 

But what about jobs further down the corporate hierarchy? It is clear that AI will be used to economise on some jobs that could easily be done by humans, as it reveals tasks which can be done at greater speed, requiring only one person, rather than two or three.

Many corporate executives are and will be driven by the bottom line and pursue cost savings, they are compelled to do so by their commitment to creating shareholder value. Others will not be, yet will have to consider the way they compete with those that do. Many recognise that even those at the top need to be replaced and that if nobody is coming up the ladder behind them, they too could go extinct. The same is true for middle management if there are no entry-level roles in the future. We must not fret, if entry-level jobs can be AI-sourced then so can Mid-level and Top-Management. It is just a matter of time for this logic to present itself as a reality across the organization. 

Alongside the jobs it will also inevitably create, the long-term effects of the AI revolution are impossible to predict, but it is relatively easy to foresee the massive disruption ahead of all. How companies strike the balance between investment into new technologies, in order to realise all the incredible opportunities and efficiencies presented by AI, with the fact that company leaders are just that – leaders of company of their fellow humans (..and now bots), will define what their economic and moral legacies are.