![](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/OPT0526-Art.jpg?w=2048\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Employers are under enormous pressure to adopt AI and ditch employees. Investors and CEOs fantasize about slashing costs and boosting margins; every CIO is pushed to come up with an AI plan, to keep up with competitors. Dreams of AI-agent-driven revolutions are everywhere.<\/p>\n
But leaders shouldn\u2019t feel like they have to rush to embrace a future that isn\u2019t here yet. There are lots of reasons for caution. Here are nine:<\/p>\n
\u201cExperts\u201d have often been wildly wrong in their predictions. The Nobel laureate and AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton said in 2016, \u201cPeople should stop training radiologists now\u2026 It\u2019s just completely obvious that within five years, deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.\u201d But few if any radiologists have been replaced a decade later. Google cofounder Sergey Brin promised in 2012 that driverless cars would be ubiquitous by 2017. Today, 14 years after that promise (and many subsequent ones by Elon Musk), fully autonomous vehicles remain a limited experiment, available in only a small number of fair-weather cities.<\/p>\n
Big Tech wants you to believe it has created artificial general intelligence. That doesn\u2019t make it true. When tech CEOs warn of employment Armageddon, they might be covering their bases in case that actually happens, but then again, maybe they just want you to drive up the valuations of their companies. Take every projection they make with a grain of salt.<\/p>\n
When it comes to impact on employment, AI giants\u2019 numbers don\u2019t support their claims. Anthropic\u2019s CEO has been warning of a jobpocalypse, but\u00a0Anthropic\u2019s own recent research\u00a0showed the gap between perception and reality. The company projects great potential for what AI\u00a0might\u00a0do in fields like finance and architecture. But what it called \u201cobserved AI coverage\u201d (a nice phrase for what is happening in the real world) made up a comically small fraction of that theoretical reach. What they imagine AI might do and what it is actually doing are light-years apart.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Current AI is \u201cjagged\u201d (good at some things but not others), which means it can seldom entirely replace a human. AI can definitely help the productivity of some workers, but even on tasks that AIs are good at, models and agents often make silly mistakes, some of which are hard to detect. And tasks aren\u2019t jobs: Even if AI can do some part of a person\u2019s job, it doesn\u2019t mean it can do all of that person\u2019s job.<\/p>\n
Current AI models still have trouble going beyond language. Some white-collar jobs involve only words, but many involve\u00a0visual comprehension: interpreting images, charts, diagrams, blueprints, maps, and so on. It might seem easy to imagine AI taking over every job, especially if you think of it as some form of magic. But once you realize that current AI is a tool, with strengths and weaknesses, you start to realize that the tech is only likely to displace workers in some professions and not others (and more often will simply augment human jobs). Even in domains like customer service that might seem straightforward,\u00a0results are often disappointing. The\u00a0Remote Labor Index\u00a0focused on jobs that could be accomplished completely over the internet, and found that less than 4.5% could actually be adequately completed by AI agents.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Most physical labor goes well beyond what current AI can do. Don\u2019t expect AI to replace plumbers, carpenters, auto mechanics, nurses, house cleaners, forest rangers, chefs, appliance repair workers, gardeners, or many other jobs anytime soon.<\/p>\n
Many layoffs that have been attributed to AI aren\u2019t really about AI. This may have been the case for the recent\u00a0mass layoffs at fintech Block; some saw it as an effort by CEO Jack Dorsey to regain investors\u2019 confidence after its stock tanked. In many cases AI may be serving as a fig leaf to cover layoffs that are actually driven by financial underperformance or earlier overhiring.<\/p>\n
Some layoffs that are attributed to AI don\u2019t last. I call this\u00a0the Klarna Effect, after buy-now, pay-later company Klarna.\u00a0In early 2024, Klarna\u00a0proudly claimed to have agents doing the work of 700 humans in customer service, in conjunction with a hiring freeze. But by spring of 2025 it had backpedaled and was hiring again, having\u00a0decided that (at least in some cases) \u201creal humans\u201d were required after all.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Overall impact on productivity and return on AI investment has so far been modest. Every company is investing in AI, but so far most aren\u2019t getting huge returns.<\/p>\n
All this could change; probably someday it will\u2014but most likely not until we see more radical advances in AI, which could be a decade or more away. In the meantime, the advice is simple: Don\u2019t focus on replacing humans. Focus on how you can use AI to help the ones you\u2019ve got.<\/p>\n
Gary Marcus is an emeritus professor of psychology and neural science at NYU, and the author of six books, including Taming Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Klarna had laid off workers whose jobs could be performed by AI. Klarna instituted a hiring freeze but did not implement layoffs. <\/p>\n
This article appears in the April\/May 2026 issue of Fortune with the headline \u201c9 reasons not to freak out (yet) about AI.\u201d<\/p>\n
#reasons #isnt #job<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Employers are under enormous pressure to adopt AI and ditch employees. Investors and CEOs fantasize…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[245],"tags":[2688,2823,961,970,315,1209,192],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2976"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2976"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2976\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}