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Will AI take our jobs?

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Will AI take our jobs? Are the following years the ones that will make humanity stop working? Or is it just a hype? These are powerful questions that will guide us to make better and long-term career changes.

A Historical Approach to Technology and the Job Market

We’re going take a empirical approach by looking at the history of technology and job market. The reason why we chose to look at history is simply because we’ve seen so many opinionated views on the future of AI, and they all lack the foundation reasoning.

 
To understand the effects of AI revolution and how will affect the job market, we should take a step back and analyze similar events.
As Steve Job said during his 2005 Standford Speech: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.“

Unemployment and Innovation: Debunking Myths

There has long been the presumption that innovations is the leading factor unemployment rate – they even called it societal Pareto improvement, meaning that 20% of the workers will do 80% of the job.
 
Although the U.S. government began tracking unemployment in the the 40s, the highest rate of unemployment to date occurred during the Great Depression, when unemployment rose to 25% in 1933.
The causes of the Great Depression included slowing consumer demand, huge consumer debt, decreased industrial production and the reckless expansion of the U.S. stock market.
There is no real evidence that innovation caused one of the most acute financial crises in history – in fact, it quite easy to tell that financial system was the one that played the main role.

So, financial system 1, innovation 0.

Recessions, Not Innovation, Drive Unemployment

Here we have the chart of unemployment rate and I’ve plotted some of the major innovation periods. We have: the invention of transistors, invention of microprocessors, launch of the internet, , launch of the world wide web, iPhone, CRISPR gene editing technology and the advancements of AI like ChatGPT.

As you can see, there is no direct correlation with unemployment and innovation. However, if we were to look at the recessions, the graph looks like this

Most of the unemployment rates were caused by recessions and not by innovation. What’s even more interesting is that recessions were mainly cause by the financial sector, some oil crises and new policies. And yes, dot com bubble is still in caused by financial crises and people’s appetite to make money out of nothing.
 
We have one black swan event that is cause by the unemployment rate to be almost 15%, and that’s from the 2020 virus. The unemployment rate is obvious here as people didn’t get out of their houses, they stop spending – so it’s safe to that the unemployment rate is not correlated to innovation.
 
So far we’ve talked about the past, and we’ve seen how innovation didn’t cause the drop of unemployment. Nor industrial machineries, innovation of internet or smartphone didn’t destroyed people jobs, otherwise, the line would look like an ascending one.
 
Did technology change the actual job people are doing? Yes, new technology came with new set of skills and new jobs were created as a result of innovations.

“Most work in the U.S. is new work” 

MIT economist David Autor

Most contemporary jobs require expertise that didn’t exist back then in 1940s, and was not relevant at that time.

The Future of Work: AI's Impact on Jobs

Coming back to the original question: Will AI take our jobs? My answer is no, at least in the current version of AI.
 
Just as we saw that unemployment rate wasn’t directly proportional to the rate of innovation, I would say AI trend is the same.
 
  1. There will be new jobs because of AI
  2. There will be new ways of doing things because of AI
  3. There will be people left behind because of AI
 
And that’s exactly how things worked when the internet appeared – it created new jobs, new ways of doing things, and people who didn’t use it were left behind.

A Tale of Two Workplaces: Past and Present

Imagine the following scenario: You wake up on a Monday morning, quickly make some breakfast, and leave the dishes in the sink because you’re in a hurry. You grab your bag and head out the door, walking on foot to your office. When you arrive, you sit at your desk, surrounded by stacks of paper, and start your day using only a pen and paper. As you work, you wrote down notes, calculate figures manually, and organize physical files in cabinets.
 
Now consider the alternative:
You wake up on a Monday morning, quickly make some breakfast, and let the dishwasher handle the cleanup because you’re in a hurry. You grab your bag and head out the door, driving your electric car to your office. When you arrive, you sit at your desk, equipped with a computer and multiple monitors. You complete the tasks efficiently using note apps and take advantage of AI to help you complete them and organize files automatically.
 
That’s exactly how I see the impact of AI in our jobs, it’s extremely similar with the impact of internet in our jobs.

Conclusion: Adapting to AI for Future Competitiveness

To conclude, we believe that AI is similar with other past innovations, and they didn’t disrupt the unemployment rate. So AI won’t take our jobs, but it’s our duty to learn to use it so that we remain competitive on the job market.