A new year - and another unfamiliar tech acronym – is set to land on our laps. Chalk that up as another big worry for bank sector employees' livelihoods.

You have to give it to Big Tech. They know how to change things up and keep anyone who is even vaguely tied to a desk for work purposes firmly on the back foot.

Now, just a little more than two years into the generative AI boom prompted by Chat GPT, we apparently must submit ourselves to the whims of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Not that New

Like AI before it, it is nothing new to Silicon Valley insiders, but something the industry has been aiming towards for decades with little thought for the consequences, in much the same way that ravenous AI data centers are rendering Net Zero’s climate goals into Net Something Very Bad.

A piece in «The_Byte» flash-news column published yesterday suggests that the final hour of the white-collar worker, or practically everyone in finance, could be well and truly nigh.

Magic Intelligence

In it, AGI was described by OpenAI as a «system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work», with CEO Sam Altman characterizing it as «magic intelligence in the sky».

The former sounds like a death knell, a chilling one, for any kind of back office worker or even staff in specialist roles, particularly at major financial institutions that can afford to implement such a newfangled super tool.

A Battered Few

Part of that is because it is an open secret that most employees who are not on the front line have been so buffeted by years of redundancies that the few that do remain possess well-honed internal political antennae while being masters of the art of «don’t look at me» work minimalism.

The Futurism website, a Recurrent Ventures media company that publishes the column, does not have good news for that specific breed of embattled desk hugger. 

Part of the 2025 Workforce

They cite an Altman post that maintains these so-called AGI «agents» may «join the workforce» as early as this year, which will «materially change the output of companies». 

According to them, that means that they would «replace human workers with all the baggage that entails». In order words, a quietly intelligent and very unpolitical tech agent is about to crash headlong into a pile of dumbfounded name droppers who spend their days trying to do nothing – and you can guess who is going to win that fight.

Not So Quick

Baggage here or there, the column also says this could simply be an attempt by Altman to get more funding and tech to build systems, not least given that many experts remain pretty unsure as to whether AGI is on the cusp of mass adoption.

Another website, «Tom’s Guide», echoes Altman’s assertion that AGI could be upon us in 2025, while also mentioning that he has a vested interest in declaring that it is about to be reached. 

All Work Gone

Still, their definition of Level 5 AGI is even more unsettling than Futurism’s. According to them, once that level is reached, AI will be «capable of doing all the work of an organization independently».

That sounds like a form of neo-Victorianism happening at a big corporate near you. It almost makes you want to become a Luddite as that pretty much would only leave the board of directors and maybe the CEO and CFO, tentatively, of your average listed public company in place. 

Troll Farms

In the end, the only job the average battered, office employee is going to have is on a troll farm taking on the disappearing mass media while boiling down Western democracy into a shriveled, mid-20th-century Peronist version of itself.