Mahendranagar, 18 August

Many individuals are concerned that they will be thrown to the economic wolves in the wake of astounding advancements in artificial intelligence. Recent months have seen a twofold increase in searches worldwide for "is my job safe?" as people worry about being displaced by large language models (llms). There is some evidence pointing to impending widespread disruption. According to recent research by Tyna Eloundou of Openai and colleagues, "at least 10% of the work tasks performed by the US workforce could be impacted by the introduction of llms." Another research predicts unheard-of disruption in the legal, accounting, and travel industries.

However, tend to enjoy making predictions about automation more than they enjoy testing them. In the early 2010s, many of them loudly predicted that robots would kill jobs by the millions, only to fall silent when employment rates across the rich world rose to all-time highs. Few of the doom-mongers have a good explanation for why countries with the highest rates of tech usage around the globe, such as Japan, Singapore, and South Korea, consistently have among the lowest rates of unemployment.

Here we introduce our first attempt at tracking ai’s impact on jobs. Using American data on employment by occupation, we single out white-collar workers. These include people working in everything from back-office support and financial operations to copy-writers. White-collar roles are thought to be especially vulnerable to generative ai, which is becoming ever better at logical reasoning and creativity.

However, there is as yet little evidence of an ai hit to employment. In the spring of 2020, white-collar jobs rose as a share of the total, as many people in service occupations lost their job at the start of the covid-19 pandemic (see chart). The white-collar share is lower today, as leisure and hospitality have recovered. Yet in the past year, the share of employment in professions supposedly at risk from generative ai has risen by half a percentage point.

Of course, it is still early. Since few businesses now employ generative AI technologies at scale, the effect on employment may only be postponed. It's also possible that only a limited number of roles will be eliminated by these new technologies. AI might be effective at some things, but it might not be as good at others, like managing people or figuring out what other people need.

ai could even have a positive effect on jobs. If workers using it become more efficient, profits at their company could rise which would then allow bosses to ramp up hiring. A recent survey by Experis, an it-recruitment firm, points to this possibility. More than half of Britain’s employers expect ai technologies to have a positive impact on their headcount over the next two years, it finds.

To see how it all shakes out, we will publish updates to this analysis every few months. But for now, a jobs apocalypse seems a way off.