The Problem With All the Noise About AI and Jobs
One way to stay positive about the future is to believe in the lessons of the past
In the fall of 2016 – a good six years before most anyone had heard of ChatGPT – my editor at Newsweek said we should do a cover story about growing fears that robots and AI were going to kill tons of jobs.
Even then, that conversation was already in the air. Serious people were saying that soon most of us were going to be living on government checks and spending our time birdwatching or playing in dad bands or indulging in some other harmless hobby just so we’d have something to do.
The five-alarm AI jobs apocalypse that Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk and other doom-and-gloomers sold us the past few years was not new, and was a big fat stupid mistake on their part. If they’d had a smidgen of historical perspective, they might have avoided scaring or pissing off a large swath of society and turning AI into a demon that graduating college seniors boo.
And now those guys are trying to backtrack. Altman recently said on a podcast that he was “pretty wrong” about AI’s jobs impact, while Amodei is saying it won’t kill jobs – it will just make us all super-productive. Yay!
So, then, what should we believe? Here is some of what I came to understand while doing that story a decade ago.
First, one of the constant refrains we’ve been hearing these past few years is that AI is so radically different from any technology ever before, it will break every pattern of adoption and impact that humans have encountered in the past.
I was a tech journalist in the 1990s when a zillion computer wizards and prognosticators said the same thing about the emerging internet. People fretted in similar ways about computers in the 1950s, electricity around 1900 and railroads in the mid-1800s. Even if today’s tech accelerates at a lightning pace, humans and companies and institutions don’t.
Yes, ground-breaking, foundational technologies have always made some jobs obsolete, and AI is certainly going to do that, and that can be a difficult transition. Optimists counter by saying that new technologies also create entirely new jobs, which is true, although that doesn’t immediately help the people who are put out of the discarded jobs.
But as I learned more, I saw that new technologies also do something interesting that can be a little less obvious and take a little time: they push people to rethink how to prosper, and they shift our spending habits, diverting money into new kinds of businesses that didn’t exist before.
Automating away various kinds of work has been a constant for more than a century, and that has actually made life better for almost everyone.
As a way to illustrate that, in my 2016 story I began with a look at the history of self-service gas station pumps, which caught on in the 1970s.
By the 2000s, the job of gas station attendant had all but disappeared – a job that had been held by hundreds of thousands of working-class people. Such massive job destruction could have created a societal disaster. But, instead, the knock-on effects started to kick in.
Here’s what I wrote:
Attendants went away, but to make the sophisticated pumps, companies like Wayne Fueling Systems in Texas, Bennett Pump Co. in Michigan and Gilbarco Veeder-Root in North Carolina hired software coders, engineers, sales staff and project managers. Station owners took their extra profits and turned their stations into mini-marts, which needed clerks, and built more gas stations, which needed more pumps from Wayne, Bennett or Gilbarco, and those companies then hired more people.
Consumers spent less money on gas because they weren’t paying for someone else to pump it. That left them more money for iPhones or fish tacos ordered on Seamless, creating more new kinds of employment.
A generation of gas station attendants got smoked, but the automation sent some clear signals that relying on such unskilled jobs isn’t a great career plan. Those signals led to more parents encouraging their kids to go to college. In 1970, 14 percent of men held four-year college degrees, and 8 percent of women did. By 2015, that was up to 32 percent of men and women.
So over time, we took hundreds of thousands of people out of the pool of those who might want a gas station attendant job and pushed them up, toward the professional job market, adding a lot of value to society and their wallets.
When all of the effects of a wave of automation sift through society, more good than bad happens. Again, from my story:
Economists have shown time and again that automation helps overall standards of living rise, literacy rates improve, average life span lengthen and crime rates fall.
After waves of automation—the Industrial Revolution, mechanization, computerization—we’re way better off in almost every way. As Matt Ridley details in his book The Rational Optimist, in 1900, the average American spent $76 out of every $100 on food, clothing and shelter; today, he or she spends $37. To buy a Model T in 1908 took about 4,700 hours of work; today, the average person has to work about 1,000 hours to buy a car that’s a thousand times better than a Model T. The United Nations estimates that poverty was reduced more in the past 50 years than in the previous 500. If progress has been less kind to the lower end of the workforce, it still helps that segment live better than before, at least by making products more affordable and better at the same time.
And yet, here’s the problem with all that: We can’t see those effects. They’re in the future. As Eckhart Tolle would say, they don’t exist because only the present exists. And in the present, we get a glimpse of what AI can do and panic. We get tone-deaf CEOs like Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg using AI as an excuse to fire thousands of employees.
It’s like: If you were a gas station attendant in 1970, and first saw a self-serve pump, all you’d think is that you’re screwed. You couldn’t know how gas stations would evolve, what new kinds of jobs might become available, or how automation would ease the burden on your household budget.
When the tech bros show us magical-seeming AI and bark that coders, lawyers, writers, marketers, managers, truck drivers and a bunch of other professions are about to get devastated, then panic, fear and anger are logical reactions. We feel the present. The future is as untouchable and opaque as fog.
It takes a lot of trust to believe that AI-driven automation will turn out well for most of us. We can’t know for sure that what’s happened before will happen again, even if it’s highly likely.
I ended the 2016 story this way:
If this is a fairy tale about work and jobs, AI is both the bad witch and good witch—destroyer and creator. In such stories, good almost always wins. But in the middle of the story, the characters don’t know that. And that’s where we are now: face to face with the monster for the first time, doing everything we can to get through the scary forest alive.