No, Ai -Robots won't do all our work

Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limit all rights reserved. Robert D. Atkinson, The Wall Street Journal 3 min Read 06 Jun 2025, 07:46 AM IST As far as police are concerned, AI robots will not arrest criminals any time soon. (Beeld: Pixabay) Summary Instead, it will increase productivity, lower prices and encourage the evolution of the labor market. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said last week that artificial intelligence could eliminate half of all white-collar jobs within five years and lower unemployment to 20%. He needs to know better – just like many other serious academics who have been warned for years that AI will mean the end of employment as we know it. In 2013, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne of the University of Oxford produced a research article in which he estimated that 47% of US employment is at risk of eliminating through new technologies. Before we thank ourselves for aging our new robot rulers, we will do it well to acknowledge that people have experienced technological disruptions before, and we have adapted to meet them. Ai will be no different. In the first half of the 20th century, tens of thousands of men and boys across America worked as pinseters in bowling. In 1946, AMF introduced an automatic machine machine, and by the middle of the fifties, these posts were mostly gone. Likewise, there was a time when the elevators in hotels and office buildings across the country were manned by human operators. In the 1920s and ’30s, lift companies’ roboths ‘bowls’ started installing with automatic controls, and eventually lift operators disappeared. Data from the US community survey of the Census Bureau tells many other similar stories – from the decline of agricultural field workers due to motorized tractors to the rise and fall of “Motion Picture Projects”, which operated projectors in movie theaters. The entire categories of jobs have been wiped out, but automation has never created a mass of lumpen proletariat. Ai Doomsayers regularly succumb to what economists call the “Lump of Labor” error: the idea that there is a limited amount of work to be done, and if a job is eliminated, it is good. It is not responsible for the second-order effects, thereby regaining the saving of increased productivity in the economy in the form of higher wages, higher profits and reduced prices. This creates a new question that in turn creates new work. Some of these are entirely new professions, such as a “content creator assistant”, but others are existing work that is in a greater question now that people have more money to spend – for example, personal coaches. Suppose an insurance firm uses AI to deal with many of the customer service functions that people have used. Assume that the technology enables the firm to do the same amount of work with 50% less labor. Some workers will lose their jobs, but lower labor costs will reduce insurance premiums. Customers will then be able to spend less money on insurance and more to other things, such as vacations, restaurants or membership of the gym. In other words, the savings are not filled under a mattress; They are spent and thus created more work. This is why Mr. Amodei’s forecast of 20% technology-driven unemployment makes little sense. This is also why most studies on the subject find no net negative effect on employment of technology-driven automation. Some have even found a positive relationship, with increases in productivity leading to more jobs. Furthermore, there is a lot of work that only people can do. Self -managed school buses still need an adult to look at the children. As far as police are concerned, AI robots will not arrest criminals any time soon. It is a similar story for fish and game keepers, fashion models, priests, stones, plumbers and flyer servers. Most professions involve collaboration with other people, with things or with ideas that are too complicated for AI to deal with alone. People in the last category include legislators, CEOs, antitrust advocates and so on. The US is experiencing chronically sluggish productivity and wage growth, an increasing number of retirees relative to workers, and massive budget deficits. It urgently needs economic growth. According to Goldman Sachs research economists, broad acceptance of AI could increase the country’s productivity growth by 1.5 percentage points per year. Let us imagine that Mr. Amodei’s serious prediction seems to be accurate. White-collar posts at entry level form less than 15% of the US workforce. Wiping half of them in five years would lose about 2.6 million jobs per year. It sounds like many until you believe that about 20 million US workers are fired or fired every year according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. In other words, the supposed AI work apocalypse, if it occurred, would be the equivalent of only about six weeks of normal labor market button. On the other hand, if the leaders of the AI ​​industry deter the pants of people, politicians and the public may demand that they captivate the interruptions on further innovation. AI-pushed productivity growth would delay, and the average American family would pay the price. Mr. Atkinson is president of the Foundation Information Technology and Innovation. Catch all the business news, market news, news reports and latest news updates on Live Mint. Download the Mint News app to get daily market updates. More Topics #Kartic Intelligence #Unwerk- Read Next Story