If you listen to media reports, the end of robot employment is already here. Big tech companies are ramping up their AI departments while cutting jobs elsewhere. And AI was directly blamed for at least 4,600 layoffs last year, with experts predicting the ultimate impact could reach millions of workers. But Elon Musk will say that the real crisis is not there, but that people aren’t having enough babies.
Last summer, Tesla CEO Elon Musk called the declining birth rate “the greatest crisis facing civilization.” In response to a Business Insider report at the time that Musk had secretly given birth to twins with an executive at brain transplant technology company Neuralink, he said in separate comments that he was “doing everything we can to curb the depopulation crisis.”
But it’s highly unlikely that all Americans will lose their jobs due to AI, argued David Orter, a labor economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who, while not specifically mentioning Musk, echoed the same undeniable reality. was. “Unless there are major changes in immigration policy, the U.S. and other rich countries will run out of workers before our jobs disappear,” Orter wrote in a paper recently published by the National Secretariat, “The Middle East.” “Applying AI to Rebuild Class Employment”. He holds a PhD in Economic Studies.
It’s simple demographics, Orter writes. Birth rates in developed countries and China are well below the approximately 2.1 children per woman needed to stabilize populations, and much of the world faces severe labor shortages, he said. insists.
“There is an abundance of jobs in developed countries, and this will continue to be the case,” Auter wrote. “This is not a prediction, but a demographic fact. Everyone who will be 30 in 2053 has already been born, and we can’t add more,” he writes.
I got a job, is it okay?
But simple employment does not guarantee economic well-being, Autor points out (as anyone who has observed the downward mobility of American workers since the 1970s can attest), so policy It’s your turn. AI has the potential to reverse that effect, argues Autor Thanks to automation over the past 40 years, computers have increasingly devalued physical labor and increasingly valued knowledge. And he argues that AI can even grow high-paying middle-class jobs.
The key, he argues, is to harness the power of AI to enhance human “expertise.” Before AI, computers made information cheap and easily accessible, increasing the value of the expertise provided by highly paid professionals (such as doctors, lawyers, and educators). Autor says that while they were able to “perform routine, procedural tasks flawlessly and almost costlessly,” they were “incapable of mastering non-routine tasks that require tacit knowledge.” ” he wrote. AI, in its infancy, does exactly the opposite. Generative AI can imitate existing images without special training or follow instructions without knowing all the rules. “If a traditional computer program resembles a classical musician who only plays the notes on a sheet of music, AI is more like a jazz musician, riffing on an existing melody or improvising a solo. or hum a new song.”
This capability means AI can be used to disrupt the top of the elite workforce and give everyone else an advantage, creating better and fairer jobs, Auter argues. do.
According to Autor, today’s “modern elite professionals such as doctors, architects, pilots, electricians, and educators” are modern versions of the artisans displaced by the mass mechanization of the Industrial Revolution. Like their 18th-century predecessors, today’s professionals spend years learning their craft as a kind of apprenticeship, using a combination of “procedural knowledge, expert judgment, and often creativity to “We work on high-stakes, often uncertain cases.”
The growing importance of “experts” is one reason why the costs of education and health care have increased by about 600% and 200% over the past 40 years, Orter said. And he argues that AI will take some of the decision-making power away from these elites and lower the cost of living for everyone else.
“By providing decision support in the form of real-time guidance and guardrails, AI can complement some of the riskier decision-making tasks currently assigned to elite professionals such as doctors, lawyers, and programmers. “It has the potential to enable more workers with knowledge of “This will improve the quality of work for workers without degrees, reduce income inequality, and improve access to key services such as health care, education, and legal expertise, similar to what the Industrial Revolution did for consumer goods. It will reduce costs.”
think nurse
To illustrate how it works, Auter used the example of a nurse. The NP job was basically invented in his 1960s to stem the impending physician shortage. In addition to a nursing degree, NPs receive additional training that allows them to perform and interpret medical tests. Diagnosing patients and issuing prescriptions were once the exclusive tasks of doctors. Thanks in part to advances in technology such as electronic health records and communication tools, this job has grown 40% over the past 20 years, with the median NP salary in 2022 expected to be $125,000, or 50% above median household income. ing.
Auter said AI is unlikely to make experts unnecessary, because AI is just a tool, like a chainsaw or a calculator, and that “tools are generally not substitutes for expertise, but rather for its application.” It is a means,” he claims. (Take pneumatic nail guns, for example: essential for professional roofers, but an imminent injury for amateurs.)
But AI can give trained workers an edge to do their best work while minimizing drudgery, Orter says. “If used well, AI could help restore the middle-skilled, middle-class core of the U.S. labor market that has been hollowed out by automation and globalization,” he wrote.
To be sure, this technology is still in its infancy, and governments will need to create policies that protect existing workers from the technology’s unwarranted application (and perhaps corporate leadership’s excessive cost-cutters as well).
But as proof that this is no pipe dream, Autor points to three recent studies that compared workers with and without AI assistance. According to one study, programmers who use GitHub Copilot, an AI coding assistant, are over 50% faster than those who don’t. Another of his NBER research papers found that AI makes customer service agents more productive, allowing them to gain experience faster (and stay on the job much longer than before). Ta. science When we compared professional writers (marketers, grant writers, consultants, etc.) using ChatGPT, we found that AI helps writers at all levels. “With both toolsets, the best writers stayed at the top of the heap, but with ChatGPT, the best writers were able to write faster, and the weakest writers were able to write faster and more efficiently. I can now write great stuff,” Autor writes.
He argues that governments should embrace an AI-assisted future and enable more workers to regain the “height, quality and agency” in their jobs that have been eroded over the past 40 years. If AI instead accelerates the race to the bottom, the consequences could be catastrophic, creating a world where everyone has a job but no one has agency.
“A future in which human labor has no economic value is, in my view, an ungovernable nightmare,” he writes.
