Ignore the Hysteria on AI and Jobs
- A study found that 60% of employment in 2018 was in roles that didn’t exist in 1940.
Will artificial intelligence destroy jobs? As sure as night follows day. Old jobs disappear and new jobs are created all the time. It reminds me of the time I got jobbed. On a “radio tour" promoting a book a decade or so ago, I was up at 4 a.m. California time calling drive-time radio programs on the East Coast, switching every five minutes and then calling in to stations farther west. I remember two things. Every radio personality sounds the same: “Hey, we’ve got a new book author coming atcha, right after these messages . . ." And the ambush.
I called into a big-city public-radio station, a great catch. We discussed my 12 rules for entrepreneurs and investors including lower costs, waste what’s abundant, scale and get horizontal. But the host wanted to discuss only the title, “Eat People." OK. I walked through the history of how technology has replaced lower-end jobs—tellers, librarians, travel agents, stock traders—with higher-value, better-paying jobs.
I thought it was going well until the host said, “Well, I’m against it." I asked, “Against what?" “I’m against technology destroying careers and lives. It has to stop. That’s why we have unions." Ruh-roh, I thought. I calmly explained that you can’t be for or against it—it’s part of progress and happens again and again, from buggy-whip manufacturers to elevator operators. And history shows that more and better-paying jobs are always created as some jobs are destroyed. He didn’t want to hear it and babbled on about the evils of big business and the need for unionization. I was ready to move on to St. Louis and Denver.
New and better jobs are always created, yet no one believes it. We no longer have “Mad Men"-era typing pools, stenographers, compositors or typesetters. A 2022 paper studying automation and job categories, led by economist David Autor, states that “roughly 60% of employment in 2018 is found in job titles that did not exist in 1940." A Goldman Sachs report from March goes further: “85% of employment growth over the last 80 years is explained by the technology-driven creation of new positions." Bingo.
Job destruction is still happening. Last July, Southwest Airlines ended expiration dates on flight credits. Generous? Nah. Having real people handling calls is expensive; I bet the airline figured it would be cheaper to have no expiration date so customers would stop calling and use its website instead. And people fight against job destruction: A few weeks ago, dockworkers reached a tentative deal with West Coast ports on automation technology—a decadeslong battle. The union wants limits on everything from computer-controlled cranes to bar codes—anything that threatens jobs. Yes, bar codes. And now this: Striking Hollywood writers are demanding that AI not be used to write “sloppy first drafts."
Now touch-screen cash registers are turned around at McDonald’s and lots of other restaurants to face customers. White Castle is using Miso Robotics’s Flippy 2—with computer vision and AI—at its fry stations, replacing workers. Soon robots will be making the chain’s famous greasy sliders.
Yet with all those jobs destroyed, there aren’t long lines at unemployment offices. U.S. nonfarm payrolls are at a record high at 155.7 million and median real wages are near their pre-pandemic and pre-inflation highs. Real jobs in real economic stats!
Yet the whining continues: ChatGPT has been out in the wild for barely six months and pundits and naive public-radio personalities warn of massive job losses. New tools like DALL-E create images based on text prompts, which apparently threatens artists. AI created a new song “Heart on My Sleeve," with simulated voices of Drake and The Weeknd. Bye-bye finicky music divas?
Oh, and that same Goldman Sachs report also claims generative AI “could expose the equivalent of 300mn full-time jobs to automation." Last week Chegg, which makes study tools, saw its stock price drop by almost half as it warned about students using ChatGPT. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna thinks 30% of the firm’s non-consumer facing employees will be gone in five years (that should have happened 20 years ago). Now comes the predictable demand for universal basic income to pay soon-to-be-laid-off workers to sit around and play videogames all day.
Slow your roll. New jobs are always created. Search-engine optimization barely existed two decades ago, and entire industries sprung from it. Imagine the boom in AI-optimization jobs. Plus, augmentation outruns automation—workers use new tools to enhance existing jobs and create higher-paying ones.
Progress will always eat people, which means we need education, training and temporary safety nets to help workers make the transition to better jobs. Are we prepared? The Journal recently reported that school districts in Las Vegas and elsewhere are abandoning homework and deadlines in favor of “equity grading." In a world of continued job disruption, that doesn’t sound like the right solution.
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