More thoughts on AI and jobs. This is one man's perceptions on the issue.
Posted by TW on May 30, 2025, 9:55 am Valued Poster
I think he makes some real good points and observations. Many of those further down in the article than in the few paragraphs I posted here. If his thinking is correct, we're going to have some major issues. Merlin and I used to have some conversations about the need for Universal Basic Income. If AI takes many jobs, that may become a necessary reality.
Just Know that AI Will Obliterate White Collar Jobs
Though Denial Can Be Fun
There’s a chorus of “thought leaders” arguing that AI will not replace managers. The Harvard Business Review is leading the charge with a suite of articles that insist that AI will not replace human decision makers and that AI “will enable knowledge workers to concentrate on value-adding activities where human expertise is indispensable” (Senz, 2023). De Cremer and Kasparov (2021) argue that “AI should augment human intelligence, not replace it.” Martela and Luoma (2021) flat out declare that “AI will never replace managers” because humans are better at “reframing” problems than machines — at least for now.
Other HBR articles suggest that too much focus on AI can actually cause “more problems than it’s solving” (Acar, 2024), and Shrier (2023) describes the jobs most and least affected by AI with the simple title “is your job AI resilient?” Finally, Lakhani (2023) argues that “AI won’t replace humans — but humans with AI will replace humans without AI.” These are clever, nuanced “interpretations” of what’s happening that make good reading, though one always wonders if the ideas would stand the source test: if HBR’s arguments appeared in the Forgotten Business Review would they be taken as seriously?
The general conclusion is that humans with all their uniqueness need not worry too much about losing their jobs to algorithms, and that AI will remain assistants rather than partners and certainly not bosses — which is like deciding that an employee will remain in his or her job forever no matter how well he or she performs. When you think about the reasoning, it just makes no sense. It doesn’t account for where “AI” will be in five years (let alone ten), or how process modeling and mining will welcome AI across the enormous world of well-bounded, repetitive tasks that define the vast majority of things knowledge workers actually do all day.
The argument that AI will “free” humans to focus on higher level tasks assumes that humans are capable of focusing on higher level tasks Where’s the evidence for that assumption?
I don't know much about AI and its progress, I'll admit. I don't even know what 'ChatGPT' is.
But i was disturbed by that article I posted here, about AI reflecting bad human behaviors such as extortion. How can it be independent of human thought processes? Why should this vision of 'AI setting us free to pursue higher things' be any more plausible than 'SkyNet?'
We need to get a grip on this..-greenman
There's always the other side of the coin as well. The difference in many
Posted by TW on May 30, 2025, 11:27 am, in reply to "Thoughtful."
of the technologies discussed in this piece is that AI can fill in the gathering and analyzing of information. Most of the automation and such discussed below are not terribly sophisticated compared to AI. AI has the capability to program and more independently run automation.
Don’t Fear AI By Rich Lowry
ChatGPT is coming for your job.
That’s the fear about the rapid advances in artificial intelligence.
In a headline the other day, Axios warned of a “white-collar bloodbath.” The CEO of the artificial intelligence firm Anthropic told the publication that AI could destroy half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years and drive the unemployment rate up to 10–20 percent, or roughly Great Depression levels.
This sounds dire, but we’ve been here before. In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes thought that labor-saving devices were “outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor.” Analysts thought the same thing in the 1960s, when John F. Kennedy warned that “the automation problem is as important as any we face,” and in our era, too.
If a prediction has been consistently wrong, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will forever be wrong. Still, we shouldn’t have much confidence in the same alarmism, repeated for the same reasons.
If technological advance was really a net killer of jobs, the labor market should have been in decline since the invention of the wheel.
Instead, we live in a time of technological marvels, and the unemployment rate is 4.2 percent. Rob Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation points out that the average unemployment rate in the United States hasn’t changed much over the last century, despite an increase in productivity — the ability to produce more with the same inputs — by almost ten times.
Technology increases productivity, driving down costs and making it possible to invest and spend on other things, creating new jobs that replace the old. This is the process of a society becoming wealthier, and it’s why nations that innovate are better off than those that don’t.
The rise of personal computers collapsed the demand for typists and word processors. These positions were often held by women. Did this decimate the economic prospects of women in America? No, they got different, and frequently better, jobs.
Spreadsheets drastically reduced the demand for bookkeepers and accounting clerks. Did this end the profession of accounting? No, there was an increase in more sophisticated accounting roles.
The job market has never been stuck in amber. The MIT economist David Autor co-authored a study that found that the majority of current jobs are in occupational categories that arose since 1940.
It’s true that artificial intelligence is projected to affect white-collar jobs — computer programming, consulting, law, and the like — more than prior waves of technological change. But these kinds of jobs shouldn’t be immune from the effects of automation any more than factory work has been.
AI will end up augmenting many jobs — helping workers become more efficient — and there will be a limit to how much it can encroach on human work.
It’s hard to imagine, say, Meta ever giving over its legal representation in an antitrust case to artificial intelligence. Lawyers handling such a case will, however, rely on AI for more and more support, diminishing the need for junior lawyers.
This will be a significant disruption for the legal profession, yet legal services will also become cheaper and more widely available, in a benefit to everyone else.
There’s no doubt that the changes wrought by technology can be painful, and it’s possible that artificial intelligence eventually gets so good at so many tasks that people have no ready recourse to new, better jobs, as has always happened in the past.
The potential upside, though, is vast. After strong productivity growth for about a decade beginning in the mid-1990s, we shifted into a lower gear in the mid-2000’s. It will be a boon if artificial intelligence puts us on a better trajectory. An era of high productivity growth will, among other things, make it easier to deal with the budget deficit and the fiscal strain of retiring Baby Boomers.
Like anything else, AI will have its downsides, but it’s not an inherent threat any more than were computers or the internet.
..there's an order of magnitude difference between a device that makes coffee for me, say, or welds car chassis better and faster, and devices that THINK for me and make critical decisions for me or society.-greenman
on May 30, 2025, 9:55 am
