A reality check on the AI jobs hysteria
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
It doesn't matter whether AI is ready to do peoples' jobs. All that matters is whether leaders who make budgets *think* it is. If they all get around a table and decide "We can cut 500 heads this year, AI will cover the productivity loss" or "We can keep the workforce flat, AI will help our workers be more productive" then that will be the reality.
Bad decisions lead to bad outcomes. Outside of SV, businesses haven't burned to the ground precisely because those decision makers have limited the impact of AI to stuff nobody was doing anyway like writing notes and filling in gaps for documentation.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Interestingly, there is currently a huge shortage of radiologists because the tech (but, more importantly, the regulatory framework) isn't quite there yet, but again people choosing a medical specialty aren't looking at today or a year or two out, they want a career that will sustain them into old age after investing years and hundreds of thousands in training. People are worried at what the landscape will look like in 5 years, let alone 20, 30 or 40.
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.
Who wants to uprise if it means instant death for the uprisers and everyone they care about?
And if things move gradually enough we are like frogs in boiling water. Think about how if many of the things openly happening today were to happen 50-100 years ago how much resistance there would have been.
To counter it with another idiom, consider the concept of having nothing to lose. Remember I’m not claiming it’ll be fun, easy, or anything like that. What I’m saying is that when push comes to shove and enough people genuinely have nothing to lose, it will not be pretty, and I’m not willing to bet on the rich and powerful coming out on top, regardless of how slowly and gradually they try to make it happen.
I think it’ll suck a lot for everyone, and specifically I’d be willing to put money on the rich and powerful wishing they’d had a little more empathy and foresight.
IT quickly spit out a half dozen things it expected to be issues and the counter measures that would be deployed instantly and likely proactively.
It showed me videos of things like these 24/7 drones for people detected and less lethal things like soundwaves as deterrents.
It showed me videos of cables hardening and other systems being used to prevent cutting cables and stealing electricity.
Discussed the size of the jails that will be built, an expected number of people that move into a few groups of cybercrime (and which would continue to thrive with that) -
Had numbers of number of people that will be eating mealworms for lunch, the political and cult shifts that will occur, all sorts of interesting things.
I'll be putting out a movie about all this that AI already knows and expects to happen. And this is all with currently known and in use technologies.
Millions will be leaving many cities, and direct to needy from farms systems may keep people alive. Office buildings being converted to mealworm and similar farming may happen.
I do not see the millions of people who make a living via call centers to be able to find similar paying jobs. Most of them, and the people who currently make a living supporting them (sandwich shops, cleaning, etc) - will be competing for delivery jobs, which will depress wages, and they will be competing with robots and x-tunnels, etc.
I need to get a working title for all this info I gathered and come back and edit.
I also think there will be significant displacement and change, but the size of the pie will grow tremendously, and there will be many, many jobs people haven't thought of to address the bottlenecks.
My point isn't so much about how many jobs will be replaced by AI, but how quickly. In my mind the doomsayers are predicting 30-70% job loss in the next 3-5 years. I'm not saying the job loss won't be that high; I'm saying it won't be that soon. If I had to guess, I'd predict 5-15 years, which won't be a party for anyone, but it's not immediate devastation.
And of course previous job loss situations were supported by other jobs people could migrate to. If this situation doesn't -- if AI swallows a substantial portion of the entire job market -- then eventually it will come down to whether we have an acceptable way to share the abundance that results.
Check any modern CMS, this is now a basic feature.
I think we just found the first evidence of AI's expected influence on the labor market.
Doubly so since both phenomena interact: recessions are the time when employers will push hard for disruptive automation.
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://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20250621_FNC...
According to the Federal Reserve data, the unemployment rate for recent grads only started to exceed the rate for all workers around 2022 and has been widening since.
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%
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.
It doesn't actually need to be good enough for people to make decisions like it is good enough. My SO left her previous job because a McKinsey spreadsheet had fanciful notions of how deeply they could do job cuts in her org. The remaining team was so overwhelmed that most people quit up to some ridiculously high management level.
So you might have people replaced en-mass, due to leaders believing the hype. Maybe they correct for it a little, but not enough to dial in to the reality.