Virtually all observers believe artificial intelligence is going to eliminate some jobs, in line with the ability AI might have to automate key job functions. The attrition could come because higher output can be achieved using fewer people, perhaps more so than because AI completely eliminates a particular job role.
But that is not even the most important "threat." Whole industries can disappear when a general-purpose technology appears, and AI is likely to be a GPT.
If AI does prove to be a general-purpose technology on the pattern of agriculture, steam power, the internal combustion engine, computing or electricity, that is inevitable. A look at the impact of various computing technologies, from personal computers to AI, illustrate the point, but huge changes in labor forces have always accompanied the emergence of a new GPT.
Agriculture allowed humans to settle, rather than living as hunters and gatherers, creating the underpinnings for economic surplus that in turn enabled population growth, job specialization and settlements that enabled the development of art, writing, legal systems, mathematics, new tools, medicine and more-complex social structures.
So concerns about changes in job composition of the labor force are realistic, if quite possibly inevitable. U.S. dockworkers recently conducted a strike among which key demands included a complete ban on automation of dock work. Discussions about that portion of new contracts remain active, but the larger point is that demands by workers to ban the use of machinery of all types has arguably slowed, but never stopped, the deployment of new technology based on a GPT that automated formerly-human labor.
Personal computers, for example, did not so much eliminate whole jobs as make possible the ability of each worker to produce some output that formerly might have been created by others (people write their own emails and documents, where in the past stenographers would have done so.
PCs democratized access to tools that allowed workers at all levels to produce output that once would have been handled by others, such as document production, data entry, analysis, and design.
Before PCs became widespread, tasks like document production, data processing, and basic design were often handled by specialized staff such as secretaries, typists, clerks, and graphic designers. “Desktop publishing,” for example, was an early use case for Apple computers.
As always, new jobs arose, as well.
At a high level, most observers might agree that AI poses similar sorts of upside and downside, from the standpoint of jobholders. New jobs are going to be created, but some existing jobs will likely decrease in number. In that sense, we can expect continued opposition to the use of AI in many industries, though such opposition will fail, over time, as obvious productivity gains often compel all contestants in a market to adopt the new technologies.
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