Research shows the robots are coming for jobsbut stealthily

Economist on AI starting to impact labor markets (studies that are mentioned are attached)

“…A look beneath the aggregate numbers, though, reveals that change is indeed afoot.…work by Daron Acemoğlu and David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Jonathon Hazell of Princeton University and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University, which was presented at the recent meeting of the American Economic Association (aea). The authors use rich data provided by Burning Glass Technologies, a software company that maintains and analyses fine-grained job information gleaned from 40,000 firms. They identify tasks and jobs in the dataset that could be done by ai today (and are therefore vulnerable to displacement). Unsurprisingly, the researchers find that businesses that are well-suited to the adoption of ai are indeed hiring people with ai expertise. Since 2010 there has been substantial growth in the number of ai-related job vacancies advertised by firms with lots of ai-vulnerable jobs. At the same time, there has been a sharp decline in these firms’ demand for capabilities that compete with those of existing ai. An ai-induced change in the mix of jobs need not translate into less hiring overall. If new technologies largely assist current workers or boost productivity by enough to spark expansion, then more ai might well go hand-in-hand with more employment. This does not appear to be happening. Instead the authors find that firms with more ai-vulnerable jobs have done much less hiring on net; that was especially the case in 2014-18, when ai-related vacancies in the database surged. But the relationship between greater use of ai and reduced hiring that is present at the firm level does not show up in aggregate data, the authors note. Machines are not yet depressing labour demand across the economy as a whole.. .. A paper from 2019 by Timothy Bresnahan of Stanford University argues that the most valuable applications of ai have nothing to do with displacing humans. Rather, they are examples of “capital deepening”, or the accumulation of more and better capital per worker, in very specific contexts, such as the matching algorithms used by Amazon and Google to offer better product recommendations and ads to users. To the extent that ai leads to disruption, it is at a “system level”, says Mr Bresnahan—as Amazon’s sales displace those of other firms, say. New work by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb of the University of Toronto suggests that this state of affairs may not persist for long, though. As the quality of ai predictions improves, they write, it becomes increasingly attractive for ai-using firms to restructure in more radical ways. At some level of accuracy, for example, Amazon’s ability to predict consumers’ desires could encourage the firm to adjust its business model—by pre-emptively shipping goods to consumers before they ever go searching at Amazon in the first place—in ways that are likely to change how many workers and of what sort the firm requires. In that event, the influence of ai on the economy could change dramatically…”

Economist Staff, "Research shows the robots are coming for jobs—but stealthily,"The Economist, January 16, 2021, https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/01/16/new-research-shows-the-robots-are-coming-for-jobs-but-stealthily