Artificial Intelligence’s Impact On Jobs Is Nuanced Posted on : Mar 31 - 2021

Well, is artificial intelligence a job-killer or not? We keep hearing both sides, from projections of doom for many professions that will necessitate things such as universal basic income to help sidelined workers, to projections of countless unfilled jobs needed to build and manage AI-powered enterprises. For a worker losing his or her job to automation, knowing that an AI programming job is being created elsewhere is of little solace.

Perhaps the reality will be somewhere in between. An MIT report released at the end of last year states recent fears about AI leading to mass unemployment are unlikely to be realized. “Instead, we believe that—like all previous labor-saving technologies—AI will enable new industries to emerge, creating more new jobs than are lost to the technology,” the report’s authors, led by Thomas Malone, director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, conclude. “But we see a significant need for governments and other parts of society to help smooth this transition, especially for the individuals whose old jobs are disrupted and who cannot easily find new ones.”

The future of AI and job growth — or losses — may be nuanced, a recent report from BCG and Faethm suggests. “Though these technologies will eliminate some jobs, they will create many others,” the report’s team of authors, led by BCG’s Rainer Strack. “Governments, companies, and individuals all need to understand these shifts when they plan for the future.”

What needs to be understood? For starters, “the net number of jobs lost or gained is an artificially simple metric to gauge the impact of digitization,” Strack and his co-authors state. “For example, eliminating 10 million jobs and creating 10 million new jobs would appear to have negligible impact. In fact, however, doing so would represent a huge economic disruption for the country—not to mention for the millions of people with their jobs at stake.”

There’s even a paradox in play. Computers tend to perform well in tasks that humans find difficult or time-consuming to do, “but they tend to work less effectively in tasks that humans find easy to do,” the report notes. Also, in many areas, technologies “will improve the quality of work that humans do by allowing them to focus on more strategic, value-creating, and personally rewarding tasks.” View More