While they continue to insist on their gloomy prognostications, the times are passing them by.
While they continue to insist on their gloomy prognostications, the times are passing them by.
I t’s a little old hat at this point to worry about the impact of generative artificial intelligence on the American job market. The sophisticated set is presently preoccupied with the sexier prospect of AI’s capacity to engineer the violent collapse of human civilization. Sober and rational though that debate may be, AI’s omnicidal intent is still a marginally less acute matter than the potential for AI-related productivity gains to crowd labor out of the marketplace.
An intrepid few still warn that the AI-induced joblessness crisis is right around the corner. Although they’re all but certain to kowtow to the latest fashion among social media’s most influential manic depressives, those who consistently call for freezing the American economy in place at any given moment in time are still doing just that, albeit with a brand-new news hook to justify their old-fashioned Luddism.
Enter the iconoclastic right-of-center protectionist, Oren Cass. In a New York Times op-ed published Thursday, Cass echoes what have now become rote admonitions against integrating AI into the broader economy lest we invite an unemployment crisis.
“According to the A.I. visionaries, the next casualty will be your job,” he wrote:
Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, told Axios last year that 50 percent of entry-level white-collar jobs could vanish in one to five years, with unemployment rising to between 10 percent and 20 percent. Elon Musk has said, “there will come a point where no job is needed.” Mr. Altman wrote that for “many kinds of labor,” wages “will fall toward zero” and warned that “if public policy doesn’t adapt accordingly, most people will end up worse off than they are today.”
“So long as management alone gets to choose the tools it deploys, it will always prefer those that decrease or eliminate the need for actual human employees,” Cass concludes, “with all their tiresome expectations of living wages and basic respect and so on, or that at least minimize their autonomy and keep them closely monitored.”
This is an argument that opponents of automation have deployed for as long as industrialized automation has existed, and it’s never been accurate.
The marginal cost of another human laborer isn’t necessarily more expensive than the upfront capital investment needed to eliminate their position, not to mention the perpetual maintenance and updates that automation requires. Workers are more flexible than their mechanized or digital counterparts, and they have more versatile applications. What’s more, increased productivity from automation gives way to more consumer demand, which creates new and possibly unforeseeable markets for labor.
If Cass or those who share his pessimistic outlook are aware of the dissent against his view — from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution to today’s AI buildout — he is giving those arguments short shrift. And while the doomers continue to insist on their gloomy prognostications, the times are passing them by.
As early as October of last year, four Brookings Institution analysts found that, despite general apprehension about AI fueled by the AI industry itself, the data suggested that a catastrophic collapse in the labor market did not seem imminent. The following March, a study published in the journal Nature found that AI had only “modest effects” on the job market, and the panic highlighted “how bad data, not sweeping automation, is driving much of today’s alarm.” Writing in the Times this spring, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon placed the AI freakout within a historical continuum of similar panics over this or the other new technology, and he forecast a near future in which AI adoption resulted in net job creation.
At the time, their contributions were drowned out amid the swelling din of terror overtaking the political press. Until this week, that is, when The Economist published an influential essay announcing the onset of the “AI jobs boom.” Indeed, it seemed this revelation dawned on the press all but simultaneously.
According to a counterintuitive report from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Washington Post reported this week, the firms that “adopted AI most intensively grew their employee headcount by about 10 percent over the following two years; firms that only dabbled saw no gain at all.” Indeed, among the “heaviest adopters, entry-level hiring grew 12 percent, faster than any other category.” The Post also noted that Gallup’s Workforce Portal, which surveys 20,000 American workers every quarter, found that the “states and industries where workers use AI most intensively” saw increases in productivity and employment.
That report poked holes in the notion that AI would trigger a cascade of “white-collar layoffs.” We already know that the AI boom has been manna from heaven for America’s blue-collar laborers.
Even though it is still generally easier to find full-time employment if you have a four-year degree, the job market for Americans without a degree is one of the best “in decades,” according to the Wall Street Journal. “In fact,” its dispatch read, “the unemployment rate for workers ages 22 to 34 who never graduated from college has rarely been lower in the past two decades, according to a new analysis by labor-market think tank Burning Glass Institute.”
Again, we’re confronted with Economics 101, since the “divergence in fortunes” among blue- and white-collar professionals is attributable to the law of supply and demand. “There aren’t enough skilled tradespeople to go around, for example, as older generations retire and immigration drops,” the Journal observed.
The AI revolution has, of course, brought with it increased displacement. Entry-level work for young professionals and aspiring thought workers, for example, has become harder to find. And perhaps that’s the motte to which the doomers will retreat when they’re ready to acknowledge that their infinitely more catastrophic warnings were exceedingly pessimistic.
For now, the AI industry’s titans have pivoted from warning that their product will ruin only a few lives to insisting that it will extinguish life itself. Maybe that’s an improvement. At least we’re all ready to move on from the jobs apocalypse narrative. Well, most of us, anyway.