A reality check on the AI jobs hysteria(technologyreview.com) |
A reality check on the AI jobs hysteria(technologyreview.com) |
It can be about the proximal cause, but it doesn’t have to be at all.
All of that said, AI is going to directly cause job loss, I’m calling it now. Not as much as the doomsayers predict, but more than most people expect.
Check any modern CMS, this is now a basic feature.
Unless there is some limit to model development we can't currently foresee, plain economics will see to it that white collar job losses will be close to total. Likewise blue collar if we don't find a limit to spatial AI and robotics development.
The problem with all these discussions is that no-one rubbishing the job-apocalypse forecasts can say why or how progress will peter out - beyond pointing to economic limits ("it's a bubble") which won't apply over longer terms. Given the pace of progress the last few years, and this inability to say why job losses won't scale with the tech, anyone ruling them out is either wish thinking, or showing a staggering failure of imagination.
If there's a reason the losses will be "Not as much as the doomsayers predict", say what it is.
OK, I'll make an attempt:
1. AI capabilities have obviously exploded at an amazing rate over the past few years, but I think most people in the field view a lot of the "Bobby grew a ton by age 13, he'll obviously be 100 feet tall in a few years"-type analysis of a few years ago to be wrong. Or, at least, people see limits to current AI tech, and that completely new/unknown approaches will eventually be needed. Of course, AI never really gets worse, and I can easily see a lot of problems (e.g. hallucination rates) being greatly improved even with just existing tech.
2. I think tons of jobs will get obliterated. I think you'd have to be insane to go into radiology as a med student right now. Tons of people currently make their living driving, and robots can already do a lot of that. More broadly, there are already lots of jobs that are basically "data in, one unambiguously correct answer out" that AI will excel at. Creative jobs will also be affected. I read a report recently about how AI dramas are all the rage in China, and they're already displacing jobs for actors.
3. But I disagree that losses will be "close to total". There will still be a strong desire for humans to actually decide on the "what do we make?", even if it's mostly made by the AI/robots. For a particular depressing and macabre analogy, think of the American South during slavery. Even though most of the actual labor was done by slaves (in the analogous case AI/robots), there were still jobs directing the work to be done.
So I guess I'm in the "it will be a shit show of epic proportions" camp, but that's still not as bad as some of the worst doomsaying I've seen.
There is a breaking point where if enough people end up jobless it will lead to genuine bloody uprisings. I won't pretend to know where exactly that point is, but I am more than happy to state that it is before "nobody has a job anymore" is reached.
The big question to me is whether the people who lost those jobs will have better opportunities in the future. That's kind of up to all of us.
Nearly all the tech layoffs are simply companies trimming fat that was there the whole time. Outside the tech bubble folks have increasing disdain towards AI and can smell AI generated content from a mile away.
The tech is cool, and useful, but massively overhyped. Now there’s a mad rush for companies to IPO before the music stops.
The technology isn't magic, it has limitations, but it's not that hard to see a large percentage of current jobs being made obsolete by AI - the BLS has already identified many such roles; https://www.inc.com/soren-kaplan/the-bureau-of-labor-statist...
I don't think it will kill all white color jobs, but on the other side, declaring it a nothing burger seems like a lot of willful blindness given it already has replaced some people and AI's capabilities have grown legions since then.
I think we just found the first evidence of AI's expected influence on the labor market.
https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20250621_FNC...
I hate it, but the X thread is the easiest review piece I can find, https://x.com/pj_lambert/status/2057477629528150369.
I struggle to see how WFH, especially as that was far more common from 2020 to 2023 than 2023 to 2026
Rather than the post-covid slump we've seen globally
> WFH makes supervision, monitoring, and on-the-job learning harder
It makes it different. In many ways it makes it easier, if you have the right supervisors and mentors working in the right way.
The larger impact would be hotdesking. Going to an office and not sitting anywhere in your team makes collaboration harder than working from home.
The requirement to move job to progress in remuneration harms retention, and thus reduces willingness to invest in a junior, but it's the expectation to move job after 2-3 years.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/Unemploy...
I think you'd struggle to draw any conclusions about AI.
Note your quote was "all workers", not "workers of same age with or without a degree"
In the aftermath of 2008, recent graduates hit 7-8%, but their contemporaries without a degree hit 15%
I agree though, that business leadership roles will still survive - with some industries, wherever some principle or vision needs to be maintained - with the normal little adjustments humans might prefer to feel out for themselves. Perhaps also politicians, sportsmen, escorts, priests, anyone involved in spiritual and new age therapy. But this is still close to total. And aside from ownership/leadership which can earn in power and influence, it isn't clear how any of these jobs would be paid.
Hinton said the same thing in 2016. Maybe it is finally different this time?
People also said you would be crazy to go into tech after the dot-com crash.
We must be listening to different experts then. One small example, Apple's widely discussed paper on the limits of current approaches: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-think...
