People have been asking that question for an astonishingly long time. Regency-era
British economist David Ricardo added to the third edition of his classic
“Principles of Political Economy”, published in 1821, a chapter titled “On
Machinery”, in which he tried to show how the technologies of the early
Industrial Revolution could, at least initially, hurt workers. Kurt Vonnegut’s
1952 novel “Player Piano” envisaged a near-future America in which automation
has eliminated most employment.
اضافة اعلان
At the level of
the economy as a whole, the verdict is clear: so far, machines have not done
away with the need for workers. US workers are almost five times as productive
as they were in the early post-war years, but there has been no long-term
upward trend in unemployment.
That said,
technology can eliminate particular kinds of jobs. In 1948, half a million
Americans were employed mining coal; the great bulk of those jobs had
disappeared by the early 21st century not because we stopped mining coal — the
big decline in coal production, in favor first of natural gas and then of
renewable energy, started only around 15 years ago — but because strip mining
and mountaintop removal made it possible to extract an increasing amount of
coal with many fewer workers.
It is true that
the jobs that disappear in the face of technological progress have generally
been replaced by other jobs. But that does not mean that the process has been
painless. Individual workers may not find it easy to change jobs, especially if
the new jobs are in different places. They may find their skills devalued; in
some cases, as with coal, technological change can uproot communities and their
way of life.
This kind of
dislocation has, as I said, been a feature of modern societies for at least two
centuries. But something new may be happening now.
In the past, the
jobs replaced by technology tended to involve manual labor. Machines replaced
muscles. On the one hand, industrial robots replaced routine assembly-line
work. On the other hand, there has been ever-growing demand for knowledge
workers, a term coined by management consultant Peter Drucker in 1959 for
people engaged in nonrepetitive problem solving. Many people, myself included,
have said that we are increasingly becoming a knowledge economy.
But what if
machines can take over a large chunk of what we have historically thought of as
knowledge work?
Last week,
research company OpenAI released — to enormous buzz from tech circles — a
program called ChatGPT, which can carry out what look like natural-language
conversations. You can ask questions or make requests and get responses that
are startlingly clear and even seem well-informed. You can also do fun things —
one colleague recently asked for and received an analysis of secular stagnation
in sonnet form — but let us stick with things that might be economically
useful.
Individual workers may not find it easy to change jobs, especially if the new jobs are in different places. They may find their skills devalued; in some cases, as with coal, technological change can uproot communities and their way of life.
ChatGPT is only
the latest example of technology that seems to be able to carry out tasks that
not long ago seemed to require the services not just of human beings but of
humans with substantial formal education.
For example,
machine translation from one language to another used to be a joke; some
readers may have heard the apocryphal tale of the Russian-English translation
program that took “the spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak” and ended up
with “the vodka was good, but the meat was spoiled”.
These days, translation programs may not produce
great literature, but they are adequate for many purposes. And the same is true
in many fields.
You can argue
that what we often call artificial intelligence is not really intelligence.
Indeed, it may be a long time before machines can be truly creative or offer
deep insight. But then, how much of what human beings do is truly creative or
deeply insightful? (Indeed, how much of what gets published in academic
journals — a field of endeavor I know pretty well — meets those criteria?)
So quite a few
knowledge jobs may be eminently replaceable.
What will this
mean for the economy?
“It is difficult
to predict exactly how AI will impact the demand for knowledge workers, as it
will likely vary, depending on the industry and specific job tasks. However, it
is possible that in some cases, AI and automation may be able to perform
certain knowledge-based tasks more efficiently than humans, potentially
reducing the need for some knowledge workers. This could include tasks such as
data analysis, research and report writing. However, it is also worth noting
that AI and automation may also create new job opportunities for knowledge
workers, particularly in fields related to AI development and implementation.”
OK, I did not
write the paragraph you just read; ChatGPT did, in response to the question
“How will AI affect the demand for knowledge workers?”
The giveaway, to
me at least, is that I still refuse to use “impact” as a verb. And it did not
explicitly lay out exactly why we should, overall, expect no impact on
aggregate employment. But it was arguably better than what many humans,
including some people who imagine themselves smart, would have written.
In the long run,
productivity gains in knowledge industries, like past gains in traditional
industries, will make society richer and improve our lives in general (unless
Skynet kills us all). But in the long run, we are all dead, and even before
that, some of us may find ourselves either unemployed or earning far less than
we expected, given our expensive educations.
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