After astonishing breakthroughs in artificial intelligence,
many people worry that they will end up on the economic
scrapheap. Global Google searches for “is my job safe?” have
doubled in recent months, as people fear that they will be
replaced with large language models (LLMS). Some evidence
suggests that widespread disruption is coming. In a recent paper
Tyna Eloundou of OpenAI and colleagues say that “around 80% of
the US workforce could have at least 10% of their work tasks
affected by the introduction of LLMS”. Another paper suggests
that legal services, accountancy and travel agencies will face
unprecedented upheaval.
Economists, however, tend to enjoy making predictions about
automation more than they enjoy testing them. In the early
2010s many of them loudly predicted that robots would kill jobs
by the millions, only to fall silent when employment rates across
the rich world rose to all-time highs. Few of the doom-mongers
have a good explanation for why countries with the highest rates
of tech usage around the globe, such as Japan, Singapore and
South Korea, consistently have among the lowest rates of
unemployment.
Here we introduce our first attempt at tracking AI’s impact on
jobs. Using American data on employment by occupation, we
single out white-collar workers. These include people working in
everything from back-office support and financial operations to
copy-writers. White-collar roles are thought to be especially
vulnerable to generative AI, which is becoming ever better at
logical reasoning and creativity.
However, there is as yet little evidence of an AI hit to
employment. In the spring of 2020 white-collar jobs rose as a
share of the total, as many people in service occupations lost
their job at the start of the covid-19 pandemic. The white-collar
share is lower today, as leisure and hospitality have recovered.
Yet in the past year the share of employment in professions
supposedly at risk from generative AI has risen by half a
percentage point.
It is, of course, early days. Few firms yet use generative-AI
tools at scale, so the impact on jobs could merely be delayed.
Another possibility, however, is that these new technologies will
end up destroying only a small number of roles. While AI may be
efficient at some tasks, it may be less good at others, such as
management and working out what others need.
AI could even have a positive effect on jobs. If workers using
it become more efficient, profits at their company could rise
which would then allow bosses to ramp up hiring. A recent survey
by Experis, an IT-recruitment firm, points to this possibility. More
than half of Britain’s employers expect AI technologies to have a
positive impact on their headcount over the next two years, it
finds.
To see how it all shakes out, we will publish updates to this
analysis every few months. But for now, a jobs apocalypse seems
a way off.
From The Economist June 17th 2023, p. 71