How Many Jobs Will AI Destroy?

The IMF head says upwards of 40% of jobs globally!!!!!!!!

Almost 40% of jobs around the world could be affected by the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), a trend that is likely to deepen inequality, according to the International Monetary Fund.

In a Sunday blog post, IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva called for governments to establish social safety nets and offer retraining programs to counter the impact of AI.

“In most scenarios, AI will likely worsen overall inequality, a troubling trend that policymakers must proactively address to prevent the technology from further stoking social tensions,” she wrote ahead of the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, where the topic is set to be high on the agenda.

I am sure that the global economic heads are really going to take this seriously as a problem as opposed to an opportunity…..

But seriously, this is a real issue:

In more developed economies, for example, as much as 60% of jobs could be impacted by AI. Approximately half of those may benefit from how AI promotes higher productivity, she said.

“For the other half, AI applications may execute key tasks currently performed by humans, which could lower labor demand, leading to lower wages and reduced hiring,” wrote Georgieva, citing the IMF’s analysis.

“In the most extreme cases, some of these jobs may disappear.”

In emerging markets and lower income nations, 40% and 26% of jobs are expected to be affected by AI, respectively. Emerging markets refer to places such as India and Brazil with sustained economic growth, while low-income countries refer to developing economies with per capita income falling within a certain level such as Burundi and Sierra Leone.

“Many of these countries don’t have the infrastructure or skilled workforces to harness the benefits of AI, raising the risk that over time the technology could worsen inequality,” noted Georgieva.

She warned that the use of AI could increase chances of social unrest, particularly if younger, less experienced workers seized on the technology as a way to help boost their output while more senior workers struggle to keep up.

I will say what I have said for years--we need to have a government guaranteed job. The ideas on the left that we can move to a “post-work” economy are just dreams and I have little use for dreams. There’s nothing in human history that suggest such a thing is possible and maybe nothing that suggests that it is desirable. Rather, we need to get ahead of a very real thing by focusing on what is possible and that is the idea of work as a human activity that every single society in global history has engaged in and is never going away, at least in terms of some kind of value or ideal. We can redefine what work is in many ways and I encourage that. The government doesn’t need to be creating ditches for us to dig up and then fill in. We can do lots of things and the New Deal showed a little bit about what was possible there, just as Covid showed that there may be some room for direct income payments under certain circumstances.

But whatever we do, we need to get ahead of what AI is likely to do to economies before it happens. Otherwise, well, there is nothing so destabilizing as hordes of unemployed young angry people with nothing to do but blow up the system.