The headlines are scary, reporting one round of mass layoffs after another from companies including Amazon, Microsoft, HP, General Motors, and UPS. Although the latest report from the U.S. Labor Department showed a slight uptick in hiring last month, the job market is far from stable, experts warn. Hiring remains at a record low, with 1.28 million fewer people getting hired in 2025 than in 2024.
With that, new and powerful artificial intelligence agents are emerging that can produce in seconds what it took teams of people months and years to achieve—most notably, OpenAI's GPT-5.3 Codex and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6. The release of both models on Feb. 5 triggered a flood of posts on Reddit and other platforms from users who fear these bots and agents will take their jobs.
With these widespread concerns as a backdrop, Johns Hopkins University will co-host a forum titled "Will AI Make Work Obsolete?" at 6:45 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 25, at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C.
Participants will debate the hotly contested question, with former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who founded the Forward Party, and Simon Johnson, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, arguing that AI will make work obsolete. Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes and Rumman Chowdhury, the founder and CEO of Humane Intelligence and an expert in responsible AI, will take the other side, arguing that AI will not replace human workers.
The debate is the third installment of the Hopkins Forum, a series of eight debates hosted in partnership with Open to Debate, the leading nonpartisan media platform steering the national conversation around the art of debate and the importance of free speech, and the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
Ahead of that discussion, which is free and open to the public but requires advanced registration, the Hub spoke with two experts from the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School who have spent decades studying how individuals and organizations adapt to technological change—Ritu Agarwal, a professor of information systems and health, who cofounded and codirects the Center for Digital Health and Artificial Intelligence at Hopkins, and Richard Smith, a professor of practice and director of the university's Human Capital Development Lab.
In the conversation below, Agarwal and Smith weigh in on the effects of AI on workers across industries at various levels and what the evidence suggests about the evolving scenario.
Note: The conversation has been edited for flow and clarity.
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