Instead of Taking Your Job, A.I. Might Transform It
Key takeaways
- Each morning, I drove through rush-hour traffic to an office park near Princeton, New Jersey, on the crowded Route 1 corridor.
- I hadn’t thought about that job in a long while, but it came to mind recently as I grappled with the potential economic impact of artificial intelligence.
- But, more fundamentally, we may be starting to realize that the automation analogy was never the right way to explain A.I.’s impacts.
Illustration by Shira Inbar Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story For this week’s Open Questions column, Cal Newport is filling in for Joshua Rothman.One summer during high school, I took a temporary job writing computer programs for a consulting firm. Each morning, I drove through rush-hour traffic to an office park near Princeton, New Jersey, on the crowded Route 1 corridor. At a desk in some sort of equipment room, I coded quick-and-dirty database tools for internal use. One of my programs simplified the process of logging hours into timesheets. Another tracked inventory for the I.T. department. My role was to find small ways to improve the lives of my co-workers.
I hadn’t thought about that job in a long while, but it came to mind recently as I grappled with the potential economic impact of artificial intelligence. Proponents and critics of A.I. often compare the technology to industrial automation: just as machines eliminated many jobs that depended on human brawn, such as weaving or mining, A.I. will eliminate jobs that require human brains. In February, Mustafa Suleyman, the C.E.O. of Microsoft AI, predicted that A.I. will deliver “human-level performance on most if not all professional tasks” within the next twelve to eighteen months. Anthropic’s C.E.O., Dario Amodei, has suggested that fifty per cent of entry-level white-collar work will be automated by the end of the decade. “A lot of jobs will go away,” Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, said last summer. (OpenAI has an agreement with Condé Nast, the owner of The New Yorker, which allows OpenAI to display its content in search results for a limited term.)
Recently, however, I’ve sensed a shift in this discourse. “A.I. is creating jobs,” the C.E.O. of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, said in an April interview. “Anybody who is saying that A.I. is wiping out jobs is scaring people.” He later said that C.E.O.s who have blamed layoffs on A.I. are lazy, and that such claims were “just a way for them to sound smart.” Even Altman said in May that he was “delighted to be wrong” about A.I. eliminating large numbers of jobs. Public-relations concerns are probably playing a key role here: eighty per cent of Americans are now somewhat or very concerned about A.I., according to a recent Quinnipiac poll, and a majority think that this technology will cause more harm than good in their daily lives. But, more fundamentally, we may be starting to realize that the automation analogy was never the right way to explain A.I.’s impacts.