AI isn’t coming for your job after all… probably

A new Yale study has found scant evidence of the jobs apocalypse some fear will be the result of artificial intelligence – but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t brace for the technology’s impact, says James Moore

Make a cup of tea, sit down, put your feet up and relax… maybe AI isn’t coming for your job after all. At least, that’s the conclusion of a new study by Yale University’s Budget Lab and the Brookings Institution think tank.

Anxiety about AI among working-age adults, especially zoomers, who are at the sharp end of this tech revolution, is quite high. Nearly two-thirds of young adults fear AI will take their jobs.

However, the study says: “Overall, our metrics indicate that the broader labour market has not experienced a discernible disruption since ChatGPT’s release 33 months ago, undercutting fears that AI automation is currently eroding the demand for cognitive labour across the economy.”

And there’s more: “Historically, widespread technological disruption in workplaces tends to occur over decades, rather than months or years.”

So maybe start to fret in a few years’ time – but not now.

The researchers based their conclusions on an analysis of official US labour market data and on figures concerning the use of and exposure to AI from the tech industry. They found scant signs in these sources that it is shoving people out of work.

Changes in the occupational mix of roles since generative AI’s advent in 2022 only “seem to mirror the trends” seen during previous tech-driven revolutions, such as the advent of the internet, while recent changes “appear to be on a path only about one percentage point higher than it was at the turn of the 21st century”, when we all started opening up browser windows as soon as the first coffee was downed.

So why did, for example, Adzuna, a jobs website, find that ground-level job openings had plummeted by nearly a third (31.9 per cent) since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022? Is the UK, from where Adzuna’s figures hail, so very different from the US? An earlier adopter, if you like.

Or is something else going on? If you concluded that something else is going on, give yourself a gold star. Banks and other big firms may simply be doing what banks and big firms do, finding ways to cut costs, even if that means, you know, cutting off the talent pipeline, leading to much higher costs when it comes to recruiting more experienced people a few years down the track. This wouldn’t be the first time that banks and other big firms on both sides of the Atlantic had succumbed to money-motivated, short-term myopia.

So why the sound and fury from CEOs and tech industry bods about a business and jobs revolution, which, the Adzuna figures would imply, is underway, but which the Yale research contradicts?

We are conditioned to think of AI as the bad guy. So, of course CEOs play into it when they’re cutting jobs to juice their bonuses. It provides them with a convenient villain to take the blame. I don’t doubt that some of them also feel that keeping workforces scared stupid of bots coming for them could also be a motivator. Time to boost that productivity!

So here’s some advice: ignore it. At the beginning of my career, we were using huge, clunky green-screen mainframes. There was no internet, and only photojournalists had mobile phones. If you wanted to read previous stories on a particular person or subject, you had to send a request to a central library. They would dig out a sheaf of paper cuttings – and fax them over.

Obviously, the internet’s advent meant that the people working in those libraries lost their jobs – but they found alternative posts. Rates of employment in the UK today are much higher than they were then, despite the increase in automation and the rapid pace of technological change in the past few decades.

Sure, joblessness is rising right now. But perhaps some academics on this side of the pond might care to compare the impact of AI with that of Rachel Reeves. I’d put money on the latter having a far greater negative impact, through increasing taxes on employment, than ChatGPT and its pals.

There is a big generation gap when it comes to AI fear. A Deutsche Bank survey of some 10,000 people across the US, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the UK found workers aged 18-34 gave their job-loss concern a far higher score than those aged 55 and over.

Boomers and Gen X-ers are far more sanguine about AI than their youthful peers. Partly, that’s down to their seniority. But partly it is probably because they’ve seen it all before.

We have lived through and adapted to earth-shattering tech revolutions before, and we’ll do it again. So chill out, Gen Z. You’ll survive. Perhaps think twice about those TikTok lamentations from the back of your car, though? They’re probably not going to help you get hired by someone else the next time your CEO is feeling antsy.