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Technological disruption will accelerate over the coming five years amid widespread adoption of AI, a change that will require more of everything, especially electricity and infrastructure, but possibly not your labor, according to Bank of America Institute’s (BAC-1.17%) “The World in 2030, Part I” report.
Up to 2 billion jobs could be displaced worldwide by tech over the period, requiring a massive re-skilling push for up to a third of the global workforce. People may instead spend time on social media by themselves — Americans were, on average, alone more than half the time in the 2019-2021 period.
“The future of work is not zero-sum between humanity and technology,” content strategist Vanessa Cook wrote in the report, pointing out that the World Economic Forum expects AI to boost net employment by 78 million. “However, compared to previous (technological) revolutions, the worry of today is the unprecedented speed of disruption from AI agents, humanoid robots, etc., where more jobs might be displaced at a faster rate.”
Cybercrime is also likely to be a growth industry, with a projected global cost of $15.63 trillion by 2029-30, with damage caused by deepfakes alone anticipated to reach $40 billion by 2027. Cybersecurity will probably worsen as faster computer processing power makes cracking passwords faster.
You may also be thirstier. Data centers are water hogs and will need 468 million gallons a day for cooling, at the same time that two-thirds of the world’s population may face shortages. The shift to AI also requires more chipmaking capacity, more electricity, more metals and more wireless bandwidth.
On the upside, a lot of the needed additional electricity will be generated from clean sources, pending the required investment. This will also require an increased investment in power grids, which need to both be reinforced and made digital and automated, according to the report.
In the U.S., re-shoring will accentuate the need to replace aging infrastructure assets. Globally, a combination of urbanization, aging populations and changing consumer preferences are driving the investment needs, including in mass transit, clean energy, housing, water, food production and waste management.