[5/8/23]New technologies poised to boost productivity more than replace jobs, analyst argues.
Artificial intelligence is that one big story right now. It’s cropping up in tons of headlines, and it always seems to be associated with a risk of now or future job loss as the new technology — launched so effectively with OpenAI’s ChatGPT — continues to prove and upgrade its ability to research, write and bring a lot of potential efficiency to the workplace.
IBM’s CEO said Monday that the company will pause hiring for jobs that could be accomplished by AI, and suggested that nearly 8,000 jobs could be affected. A March report by Goldman Sachs said that, if AI delivers on its promises, 300 million jobs in the U.S. and Europe could eventually be subjected to some automation.
And businesses across the country are ramping up their efforts to hire workers who can speak the ChatGPT language.
The reality, though, might not be quite as bad as it seems.
One senior employment analyst, speaking with Yahoo Finance Friday morning, thinks that AI will do more to replace tasks than jobs.
“What I’m hoping is — and I have to be lucky on this — is that it’s mostly replacing tasks. I’m actually going to be more productive in the future,” Matt Darling, an employment policy fellow at the Niskanen Center said. “I don’t think the situation that people are really worried about, where we’re going to see permanently high unemployment rates because of AI, I don’t think that’s particularly likely. I think there’s going to be a lot more complementing human abilities and human ingenuity than we are going to be substituting it for.”
That doesn’t mean that AI won’t have an impact on jobs. Darling, mentioning the field of translation, which could soon be replaced by AI, stressed that, as society begins to adjust to AI, the focus has to be on retraining the people whose jobs change due to the technology.
To Darling, a strong labor market comes down to smart fiscal policies and monetary support.
The important thing, he said, is that “we don’t use AI as an excuse to do bad macroeconomic policy.”
