How Will AI Affect Jobs?

Rapid improvements in AI capabilities and growing corporate adoption have led some prominent technologists to predict that AI could eliminate a mass number of jobs before the end of the decade. So just how concerned should we be about an AI job apocalypse? I'm Allison Nathan, and this is Goldman Sachs Exchanges. Each month, I speak with investors, policymakers, and academics about the most pressing market moving issues for our top of mind report from Goldman Sachs Research. This month, I spoke with MIT's Darren Asamoglu and Neil Thompson, as well as with Joseph Briggs, who leads the global eco

So to level set, if we look at the labor market today, you can see the imprint of AI in a few industries and a few sectors where we know that AI is already having an impact. And so if we combine across sectors like tech and management consulting and graphic design, areas where tools have already been developed and deployed, you can see that overall there's probably a 10,000 to 15,000 drag on month over month job growth from AI impacts. All that being said, it's still a fairly narrow labor market shock, and we're not seeing a big impact today on the broader economy. Now, I do expect that will c

That's a pretty big number.

It is a big 9% of workers being displaced by AI would correspond to 15,000,000 workers leaving or being displaced from their positions today and having to find new jobs. Displacing 9% of workers would be the type of automation and reallocation shock that we saw in the late '90s and early 2000s, and other periods of significant technological change. What I'd really emphasize is that it is over a ten year period, and as long as the displacement and the job loss is spread out enough, then the impact on the unemployment rate in any given year will likely not be that large. So for example, even und

And then also a key part of your forecast is that in addition to these job losses, you'll have creation of jobs. So talk us through your assumptions and expectations there.

Yeah. We're not expecting that displaced workers will be displaced over the long run. We do expect that ultimately there are going to be more than enough jobs created to reabsorb workers back into the labor market. And the key reason for this is that there's a long historical record of technology delivering significant job gains. A couple stats that I would flag around that. If we look back over the last eighty years, around 85% of job growth has been driven by the technological creation of new positions. Likewise, The US labor market is incredibly dynamic. Every year we see around 30,000,000

Just to be perfectly clear, you don't subscribe to the view that we are going to see a world in which a lot of people just don't end up with a job.

Yeah, definitely not. I think that the view that has been put forth by a lot of tech commentators where jobs are going to be permanently displaced, It really focuses on the job loss aspect, which as we've discussed, will likely be pretty meaningful, but it ignores the job creation aspect. And as long as we see history repeat itself, and we see that technology does, again, as it always has, lead to new work opportunities, then we won't see permanent job loss over the long run.

MIT's Neil Thompson is less convinced that AI will displace a large number of workers. He argues that capability alone isn't sufficient to do so. And he points out that jobs consist of many tasks, only some of which can be automated. So he seems to expect a slower and more uneven labor market adjustment than AI's current capabilities suggest. And he also takes some comfor