On The Real AI Insights And Achievements Behind ChatGPT: The last AI boom didn't kill jobs. Feel better? #ai #chatGpT #achievments #news #aplications
For months, anxiety about the AI behind ChatGPT has been running high. Who would have thought that a humble chatbot could inspire expectations of human extinction, rampant misinformation and mass employment – in just seven months? But this isn't the first algorithm to be embraced by companies as a way to automate valuable work.
If ChatGPT and generative AI live up to even a tenth of the hype surrounding them, wide-scale job losses might seem inevitable. But new economic data shows that the last big leap in AI did not coincide with a reduction of jobs in affected industries—despite widespread fears of rapid replacement at the time.
In a new research paper, economists looked at the job market across a number of European countries between 2011 and 2019. That’s the period during which the AI technique deep learning emerged as a powerful way to automate tasks like transcribing speech, analyzing images, and making algorithmic recommendations for social feeds and ecommerce sites. Back then, deep learning was widely expected to have a broad and swift impact on employment.
To check up on what really happened, researchers at the European Central Bank, Spain’s central bank, and the universities of Oxford and Pittsburgh used two established methods for measuring how vulnerable professions are to AI-powered automation. Both involved examining the tasks workers do and how they compare with the capabilities of algorithms. The researchers cross-referenced that information with survey data on EU workers that shows the number of people leaving or joining different occupations in industries ranging from agriculture to financial services.
The headline result was that industries where AI could be the most useful did not see a reduction of jobs. In fact, for more highly skilled jobs vulnerable to AI, such as white-collar office work that involves working with data, there was around a 5 percent increase in the number of employed workers. The researchers say this supports the idea that new technology can increase demand for more skilled workers at the same time that it replaces those who do routine work. Less skilled workers didn’t seem to be significantly affected by software or AI.
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