AI & Job Loss
By 
I have long been on record with concerns about the connections between artificial intelligence and massive job loss. That was the subject of my first New York Times op-ed. Some people didn’t like it because they noted that the nation had survived automation before and that previous fears of this had proven unfounded. The problem with that analysis though is that previous rounds of automation generally eliminated one type of work whereas current AI efforts seek to eliminate…work entirely. We are already seeing this have an impact in areas that were not previously thought to be targets of automation.
When ChatGPT came out last November, Olivia Lipkin, a 25-year-old copywriter in San Francisco, didn’t think too much about it. Then articles about how to use the chatbot on the job began appearing on internal Slack groups at the tech start-up where she worked as the company’s only writer.
Over the next few months, Lipkin’s assignments dwindled. Managers began referring to her as “Olivia/ChatGPT” on Slack. In April, she was let go without explanation, but when she found managers writing about how using ChatGPT was cheaper than paying a writer, the reason for her layoff seemed clear.
“Whenever people brought up ChatGPT, I felt insecure and anxious that it would replace me,” she said. “Now I actually had proof that it was true, that those anxieties were warranted and now I was actually out of a job because of AI.”
Some economists predict artificial intelligence technology like ChatGPT could replace hundreds of millions of jobs, in a cataclysmic reorganization of the workforce mirroring the industrial revolution.
For some workers, this impact is already here. Those who write marketing and social media content are in the first wave of people being replaced with tools such as chatbots, which are seemingly able to produce plausible alternatives to their work.
Experts say that even advanced AI doesn’t match the writing skills of a human: It lacks personal voice and style, and it often churns out wrong, nonsensical or biased answers. But for many companies, the cost-cutting is worth a drop in quality.
Again, the government job guarantee is the ultimate policy here. I still don’t believe in UBI, though parts of it are useful. The reason for my skepticism is fairly simple–every human society in history has valued work like it has food or gender or other socially constructed core parts of human culture. What work means can be very different things and it doesn’t have to be working in a factory for an employer per se, but we are a species that works. Telling humans not to value work is like telling ants not to value work. It’s just nonsense. So we need to find ways for people to have work in their lives. That doesn’t mean the private sector doesn’t have a major role to play here. Of course it does. In fact, the government job guarantee would be the government as employer of last resort, as it was in the New Deal with things like the WPA and all that meant, from building sidewalks to sending out unemployed writers to find something to write about in the public interest. But if AI is real, this is going to be a major, huge, gigantic policy issue going forward and we had better get ahead of it.