Young will suffer most when AI ‘tsunami’ hits jobs, says head of IMF
Artificial intelligence will be a “tsunami hitting the labour market”, with young people worst affected, the head of the International Monetary Fund warned the World Economic Forum on Friday.Kristalina Georgieva told delegates in Davos that the IMF’s own research suggested there would be a big transformation of demand for skills, as the technology becomes increasingly widespread.“We expect over the next years, in advanced economies, 60% of jobs to be affected by AI, either enhanced or eliminated or transformed – 40% globally,” she said.“This is like a tsunami hitting the labour market.”She suggested that in advanced economies, one in 10 jobs had already been “enhanced” by AI, tending to boost these workers’ pay, with knock-on benefits for the local economy.
By contrast, Georgieva warned that AI would wipe out many roles traditionally taken up by younger workers.“Tasks that are eliminated are usually what entry-level jobs do at present, so young people searching for jobs find it harder to get to a good placement.”Meanwhile people whose jobs were not directly changed by artificial intelligence risked being squeezed, she said, with their pay potentially falling without a productivity boost from AI.“So the middle class, inevitably, is going to be affected,” Georgieva predicted.She said her greatest fear was that AI was insufficiently regulated.
“This is moving so fast, and yet we don’t know how to make it safe.We don’t know how to make it inclusive.Wake up, AI is for real, and it is transforming our world faster than we are getting ahead of it,” she said.Much of the debate at the annual meeting of the business and political elite in the Swiss ski resort this week has been hijacked by Donald Trump’s on-off tariff threats over the future of Greenland.But many delegates were also keen to highlight the risks and benefits of AI.
Christy Hoffman, general secretary of the UNI global union, told the Guardian: “It’s just a basic premise that the point of AI, on the business side, is to increase productivity, therefore lower costs – which will be cutting jobs.”“I think it’s time to come to terms with that disruption – and how to manage that disruption,” she said, calling for the productivity benefits to be distributed fairly across the economy.“We want to share in the gains.We’re not going to stop AI, nor do we want to even try – but we don’t want it to just roll over us.” She called on employers to discuss the role of AI tools with workers and their representatives before introducing them.
Earlier in the week at Davos, the Microsoft chief executive, Satya Nadella, warned that AI could lose its “social permission” to compete for resources such as energy, for example, if it failed to generate benefits beyond a few powerful tech firms – such as the rapid development of effective new drugs.Georgieva was speaking on a panel alongside the president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, who warned that the AI boom could be hampered by growing mistrust between rival economies, as the US throws up tariff barriers.“We are dependent on each other,” she said, pointing out that AI was capital intensive, energy intensive and data intensive.If countries did not work cooperatively and “define the new rules of the game,” she said, there would be less capital and less data.“We are in a bind, lets face it,” she said.
Lagarde also sounded the alarm about widening global inequality, highlighting the “disparity that is getting deeper and bigger”.Earlier in the week at Davos, the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, urged delegates to face up to a permanent “rupture” in the global economic order, and band together in the face of erratic US trade policy.But Lagarde said she was less gloomy.“I’m not exactly on the same page as Mark,” she said.“I’m not sure that we should be talking about rupture.
I think we should be talking about alternatives,”
Experts warn of threat to democracy from ‘AI bot swarms’ infesting social media
Political leaders could soon launch swarms of human-imitating AI agents to reshape public opinion in a way that threatens to undermine democracy, a high profile group of experts in AI and online misinformation has warned.The Nobel peace prize-winning free-speech activist Maria Ressa, and leading AI and social science researchers from Berkeley, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and Yale are among a global consortium flagging the new “disruptive threat” posed by hard-to-detect, malicious “AI swarms” infesting social media and messaging channels.A would-be autocrat could use such swarms to persuade populations to accept cancelled elections or overturn results, they said, amid predictions the technology could be deployed at scale by the time of the US presidential election in 2028.The warnings, published today in Science, come alongside calls for coordinated global action to counter the risk, including “swarm scanners” and watermarked content to counter AI-run misinformation campaigns. Early versions of AI-powered influence operations have been used in the 2024 elections in Taiwan, India and Indonesia
Grok AI generated about 3m sexualised images in 11 days, study finds
Grok AI generated about 3m sexualised images in less than two weeks, including 23,000 that appear to depict children, according to researchers who said it “became an industrial-scale machine for the production of sexual abuse material”.The estimate has been made by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) after Elon Musk’s AI image generation tool sparked international outrage when it allowed users to upload photographs of strangers and celebrities, digitally strip them to their underwear or into bikinis, put them in provocative poses and post the images on X.The trend went viral over the new year, peaking on 2 January with 199,612 individual requests, according to analysis conducted by Peryton Intelligence, a digital intelligence company specialising in online hate.A fuller assessment of the output from the feature, from its launch on 29 December 2025 until 8 January 2026, has now been made by the CCDH. It suggests the impact of the technology may have been broader than previously thought
Scarlett Johansson and Cate Blanchett back campaign accusing AI firms of theft
Scarlett Johansson, Cate Blanchett, REM and Jodi Picoult are among hundreds of Hollywood stars, musicians and authors backing a new campaign accusing AI companies of “theft” of their work.The “Stealing Isn’t Innovation” drive launched on Thursday with the support of approximately 800 creative professionals and bands. The campaign includes a statement accusing tech firms of using American creators’ work to “build AI platforms without authorisation or regard for copyright law”.It adds: “Artists, writers, and creators of all kinds are banding together with a simple message: Stealing our work is not innovation. It’s not progress
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Donald Trump is worried about datacenters. Specifically, he is concerned about their effects on an already expensive electricity market in the United States. Will Americans’ resentment of sharply rising energy costs scuttle his party’s November election ambitions?The US president’s anxiety is evident in two actions in recent weeks. On 13 January, Trump and Microsoft’s president jointly announced that the tech giant would pay more for its datacenters, paying full property taxes and accepting neither tax reductions nor electricity rate discounts in towns where it operates datacenters.“We are the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, and Number One in AI
My analogue month: would ditching my smartphone make me healthier, happier – or more stressed?
When I swapped my iPhone for a Nokia, Walkman, film camera and physical map, I wasn’t sure what to expect. But my life soon started to changeWhen two balaclava-clad men on a motorbike mounted the pavement to rob me, recently, I remained oblivious. My eyes were pinned to a text message on my phone, and my hands were so clawed around it that they didn’t even bother to grab it. It wasn’t until an elderly woman shrieked and I felt the whoosh of air as the bike launched back on to the road that I looked up at all. They might have been unsuccessful but it did make me think: what else am I missing from the real world around me?Before I’ve poured my first morning coffee I’ve already watched the lives of strangers unfold on Instagram, checked the headlines, responded to texts, swiped through some matches on a dating app, and refreshed my emails, twice
Big tech continues to bend the knee to Trump a year after his inauguration
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, the Guardian’s US tech editor.One year ago today, Donald Trump was inaugurated as president of the United States. Standing alongside him that day were the leaders of the tech industry’s most powerful companies, who had donated to him in an unprecedented bending of the knee. In the ensuing year, the companies have reaped enormous rewards from their alliance with Trump, which my colleague Nick Robins-Early and I wrote about last month after Trump signed an executive order prohibiting states from passing laws regulating AI
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