Last update:October 30, 2024, 7:42 p.m. IST

Silent termination is a workplace practice in which employers deliberately make jobs more difficult to cause employees to quit.

Many employers now resort to “silent dismissal”. (Photo credits: Shutterstock)

As concerns about job security in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) continue to grow, experts say the impact is already being felt across the workforce. Instead of allowing their employees to “silently resign,” employers are increasingly resorting to “silent termination.” For those unfamiliar with the term, quiet quitting gained popularity during the pandemic, when employees began doing only the bare minimum – or less – in an effort to get an easy paycheck or in the hope to be made redundant with severance pay.

George Kailas, CEO of Prospero.Ai, expands on the concept of silent firing in his Fast Company column, stating: “Silent firing is when companies make work more difficult in the hopes that employees will quit, so that their work can be automated. He said Amazon is a prime example of this emerging trend, noting that the company insists on a five-day in-office work week, despite significant staff dissatisfaction with the return-to-office policy.

As a result, 73% of workers considered quitting, according to a survey reported by the New York Post.

Kailas claims that while there is substantial evidence that remote work improves productivity, Amazon is engaging in “silent dismissal by making the workplace inhospitable.”

“Because the best way to decrease retention while saving on severance would be to eliminate remote work,” Kailas wrote in his column.

Kailas pointed out that outside of the areas of AI and emerging startups, the tech recruiting landscape has become quite stagnant. He added that it’s “even more alarming is that we haven’t even scratched the surface of the AI ​​adoption curve.”

Daron Acemoglu, an economist and professor at MIT, says that only 5% of jobs can be replaced or supported by AI over the next decade. “A lot of money is going to be wasted. You won’t get an economic revolution with this 5%,” Acemoglu told Bloomberg.

Acemoglu believes that AI is not yet reliable enough to handle tasks typically done by humans and predicts that the technology will not advance significantly in the near future.

“You need highly reliable information or the ability of these models to faithfully implement certain steps that workers were doing before. They can do it in a few places with some human supervision… but in most places they can’t,” Acemoglu said.

As concerns about job losses due to AI increase, another trend is emerging among Generation Z, known as the “great detachment.” This term, related to “quietly quitting” and “quietly vacationing,” describes a decrease in employee engagement driven by worker dissatisfaction.