This is the first article in a two-part series on the threat of AI-driven job loss and worker displacement.
Creeping anxiety about AI-driven job loss has spilled into public consciousness.
A decade ago, there were conversations at Silicon Valley house parties about universal basic income as a fix for the impending wave of automation. A year ago, computer scientists began elaborating their predictions not just on the open-access archive arXiv but as elegantly formatted self-standing websites, such as Situational Awareness (recommended by Ivanka Trump) and Gradual Disempowerment, followed by AI 2027 (read by J. D. Vance).
This past month, from Barack Obama’s Twitter/X feed to Time magazine to the New York Times, AI job anxiety has gone mainstream. Faced with the sensation of being atop a roller coaster about to pitch into the unknown, normal responses include emotionally detaching — or chalking the grand predictions up to hype. It is of course the business model of these tech companies to promise their products can save money by replacing labor; they need us to believe it.
We’ve also seen a counterreaction to the anxiety emerge. A paper by Apple researchers indicating that large language models don’t actually reason went viral, held up as evidence that progress is stalling and an AI bubble may be about to burst. Another recent study finding that open-source developers worked more slowly when using AI tools than when they didn’t, bolstered the position that forecasts of AI progress may be overblown.
We think that worker displacement by AI is a real problem. And it’s a problem that needs our focus and attention right now — not in ten years or in some distant future. It represents a looming…
Auteur: Holly Buck
