SINGAPORE: In a social media post, Amrin Amin weighed in on recent AI-linked job losses, expressing concern for workers who have done everything right for their careers, and yet are finding themselves falling behind at present due to the disruptions brought about by rapid technological developments.
Mr Amrin, a former Member of Parliament for Sembawang under the People’s Action Party who served as Senior Parliamentary Secretary for Health and Home Affairs, noted on May 21 the thousands of job cuts recently announced by Meta, Standard Chartered, and DBS.
He pointed out how the three companies are not in financial trouble. “Meta made about US$62 billion in net profit in 2024. Standard Chartered just posted record profits. DBS is one of Asia’s most profitable banks,” Mr Amrin wrote, adding that because of AI, they no longer need the same workforce numbers to do the same amount of work.
The former MP quoted StanChart’s CEO, who had characterised the matter as “replacing lower-value human capital with financial capital.”
Mr Amin wrote, “The machine is the better investment. The worker is the cost being cut. That is a different kind of job loss from what we are used to. Not companies cutting jobs to survive. Companies doing very well and deciding they can do even better with fewer workers.”
He added that more such job cuts are likely to come, quoting a 2023 estimate from Goldman Sachs that said AI could displace tasks equivalent to 300 million full-time jobs worldwide.
Mr Armin expressed a particular concern for mid-career workers, arguing that the solution that is often given, retraining, is simpler on paper than in reality, as not everyone has the “savings, aptitude, time or opportunity” to retrain, and many workers already have to juggle higher living costs, raising children, caring for ageing parents, along with work.
“Retraining sounds good in a speech. Living through it is another matter. Balance sheets adjust in quarters. Human lives take much longer,” he wrote, but acknowledged how it has become a necessity to retrain and reinvent yourself during the course of your career, which has become “a growing source of stress and insecurity.”
Workers’ fears involve not simply job loss but are far more existential, in that what people believed as a formula for success, studying and then working hard, no longer exists today, he added.
“The deeper fear now is becoming economically irrelevant despite doing everything society told you to do,” the former MP wrote.
In Singapore, anxieties about AI taking over more jobs exist “alongside a longer-running anxiety about good jobs, rising living costs and competition from global talent.”
Mr Amrin, though acknowledging Singapore’s openness as “a genuine strength,” warned that “many locals will feel the squeeze even when the economy looks healthy on paper.
“That gap between headline growth and lived experience is where the real political tension lives. Because once enough people stop believing hard work and adaptability will still give them a stable future, the problem stops being only economic. And that is a test no algorithm can solve,” he added. /TISG
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