Why the AI job apocalypse (probably) won’t happen

Maybe AI isn’t going to replace you at work after all

IT’S BEEN A good couple weeks if you’re someone who’s worried about AI replacing all workers and leaving you with nothing much to do: Top AI and tech executives have started singing a different tune lately when it came to the job-replacing prospects of frontier AI models.

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“I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level, white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened,” said OpenAI’s Sam Altman at a conference in Australia last week. “I don’t think we’re going to have the kind of jobs apocalypse that some of the companies in our space advocate or talk about.”

Altman went on to say he had doubts that work could be fully automated, because “we really do care about our interactions with people,” and as a result, “the jobs picture is likely to be very different than we thought.”

While that might not seem congruent with what we’ve seen in the job market — a lot of unspecific references to AI as justification for layoff announcements — experts in AI echoed this sentiment, saying the technology hasn’t progressed to a point where it is able to mass replace white-collar workers.

“There haven’t been any dire consequences for jobs over the last year, despite AI models getting to levels that their CEOs thought might actually have an impact,” said Joshua Gans, a professor at the University of Toronto, speaking to the National Post. “I think when they were making these pronouncements a year ago, they were talking about the stuff that we now have in our hands.”

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Don’t get too excited thinking this is some form of benevolence. In actuality, the reason likely comes down to money. You need look no further than tech giant Uber for a case study: the company, which has invested heavily in AI tools for software engineering, recently came out and said the amount of money it is spending on AI is “harder to justify,” and added that, like many other companies, it is struggling to see a productivity ROI from AI spending. “I think over the coming quarters and years, maybe that will become clearer, but I think today it’s hard,” said COO Andrew Macdonald.

But it might also be the case that the AI folks are simply trying to manage public perception.

“Public opinion research has made pretty clear that [people] feel quite negative about AI,” said Peter Wildeford, head of policy at the AI Policy Network, speaking to Time magazine. “The AI industry, and particularly Sam Altman, has responded with an about-face: it’s not going to replace most white-collar workers, it’s actually going to create tons of jobs and any pain along the way is temporary. It’s hard to say whether they’ve actually changed their forecasts for AI’s economic impact, or whether they’re just trying to change the narrative.” Kieran Delamont