Why Big Tech is postponing the AI jobs doomsday

The heads of big tech have recently changed their tune regarding artificial intelligence’s effect on jobs. The emerging technology will bolster the workforce, not replace it, they now say. It’s an assessment that the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) shares and it explains why in a paper published today, Don’t Panic: A Skeptic’s Guide to the AI Jobs Doomsday.

Critics such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have argued that AI is a threat to many Americans’ livelihoods. Much of that fear stems from AI reaching sectors that were previously thought to be more resistant to technological shifts: higher-skilled jobs requiring independent thought and creativity, like journalism, graphic design, or legal research.

Many tech leaders fueled these fears by promising major transformations to the workforce through AI adoption. Those same leaders, however, are now presenting brighter potential scenarios. “The companies that I know that have adopted AI the most are also the ones hiring the most,” OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman told CNBC in June. Altman’s optimism is part of a broader trend among tech leaders, The Wall Street Journal noted this week.

Don’t Panic points out that new technologies have long bred fears that they’ll eliminate jobs and that, indeed, some disruption is inevitable. But history also shows us that technologies that increase productivity ultimately increase opportunities for work and often create better, safer jobs. The advent of the automobile may have initially been problematic for the leathermakers who made buggy whips and bridles for horses. But it didn’t destroy the leather-making industry. After all, someone had to make the leather that covered the seats of the cars coming off the assembly lines.

Bill Beach, economist and former head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, told CEI in Don’t Panic that AI is not only a new technology, “but it is also a new form of labor and that is the part that is puzzling everyone.” He calls AI “enhanced labor” because it performs tasks that previously could not be automated. This capability could prove a major boon because workers will be able to produce goods and services they previously could not and learn new skills faster than ever before. “Any time you add more labor into the economy, you get more output,” Beach notes.

The fact that AI may affect certain tasks doesn’t mean the workers themselves will be rendered redundant. They’ll move to different tasks instead. Consider, for example, AI’s potential effect on the legal profession. Many parts of legal work are labor-intensive: researching cases and precedents, drafting memos and discovery summaries, and similar tasks. This work still requires significant editing and oversight but using AI to produce first drafts could accelerate the process, reducing billable hours. Legal work could become less costly and, therefore, potentially more accessible.

Turning a press release into a news story, to cite another example, has traditionally required a human mind, but the task was usually not mentally taxing for the journalist involved. Such work was frequently handed off by editors to interns or rookie hires. Editorial staff would still need to read the copy and make any necessary changes.

Consider, too, the retail merchant who writes and stars in their own tacky late-night TV advertisements. Generative AI will allow that merchant to create the graphics and animations, resulting in far more elaborate and ambitious, if still tacky, late-night ads.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said recently that AI adoption means that businesses can “do the same thing with less resources, and that leads to things like layoffs, or they can do more with the same amount of resources. But that requires creativity.”

Smart businesses will choose the latter path because it means greater productivity. But they’ll still need living, breathing employees to make that happen.