In recent weeks, the drumbeat of catastrophic labor-market forecasts has grown louder, with tech CEOs, financial analysts, and journalists penning viral predictions of an impending unemployment crisis.
In my view, the threat of AI-induced unemployment is worth taking seriously. And I've sketched out the case for alarm in past essays.
If the AI doomers' concerns are warranted, however, their certainty is misplaced. Artificial intelligence could trigger mass white-collar layoffs in the near future. But there are plausible arguments against that scenario.
To inject some balance into the AI discourse — and/or, reassure myself that my hard-won verbal skills aren't about to be less economically valuable than my flimsy biceps — I've sought out reasons for optimism about the white-collar labor market. Here are the four that I found most compelling:
1. You can see the AI age everywhere except in the jobs data. The first reason to doubt the doomer scenario for AI and unemployment is that it keeps not happening. Or, more precisely: Despite the astounding capacities of today's LLMs, there still aren't many signs of large-scale, AI-induced job loss.
It takes time for firms to adopt new technologies, of course. But generative AI has been remarkably powerful for a while now. And America's unemployment rate has barely budged over the past two years, hovering near 4 percent.
Even in the industries most suited to AI-driven automation, employment shifts have been modest. Job postings for software developers have actually increased over the past year. Employment in market research, meanwhile, went up after ChatGPT hit the market.
2. White-collar workers don't need to outperform AI to remain economically valuable. To remain economically valuable, a human worker does not need to outperform a machine at their job's core tasks; they merely need to usefully complement that machine's operations.
Consider translators. LLMs can convert text from one language to another at a speed and cost that no human could ever match. For many tasks, if corporations, authors, and publishers were forced to choose between having access to AI — or the world's most gifted linguist — they would choose the bot.
And yet, a human translator working with an LLM still produces better text than the machine does by itself. So long as human translators retain this utility, AI progress won't necessarily reduce demand for their services. In fact, if you drastically increase the efficiency of translation — and thus, reduce its cost — then people will purchase more of it.
3. People want some things done by people. In some domains, white-collar workers may retain an advantage over AI simply because they are human. As the economist Adam Ozimek notes, many contemporary occupations — from travel agents to fitness instructors — could have been automated out of existence long ago, were technology the only concern.
This won't preempt an AI-induced employment crisis, all by itself. Consumers don't typically care how their smartphone apps were coded or insurance claims were processed or tax returns were prepared. But a market for explicitly human-produced goods and services is likely to persist in many realms — including sales, medicine, legal services, and entertainment.
Heck, there might even be durable demand for human-produced journalism.
4. AI progress won't necessarily be exponential. All these arguments count for little if AI's capacities are truly growing at an exponential rate — which can appear slow at first, but quickly become overwhelming. It's not clear that's happening, though: Claims that AI's progress has been exponential tend to rest on a single, widely cited benchmark — and the methodology behind that benchmark has massive problems.
Moreover, even if we knew that AI has been improving exponentially over the past three years, we still couldn't take a continuation of that trend for granted. Technologies routinely improve at an exponential rate for a period, only to stall out at a certain level of capability.
These arguments don't prove that the laptop class is going to be fine. They merely offer a basis for believing that it might be. Indeed, everything I just wrote could be true — and AI could still drastically erode knowledge workers' economic prospects.
But as the world's most influential business leaders and intellectuals discuss the impending elimination of white-collar work, it's worth keeping their narrative's liabilities in mind: This doomsday scenario has scant support in existing employment trends, sits in tension with multiple economic principles, and relies on dubious assumptions about the pace of AI progress.
In other words, while it's past time for policymakers to prepare for AI-induced unemployment spikes, knowledge workers don't yet need to toss our keyboards and learn to plumb.
Read Eric's full story here.
