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- cross-posted to:
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Lots of people see the potential for AI & robotics to replace human work, but you rarely see mainstream economists deviate from the party line. The normal response is - nothing to worry about, new jobs have always been created by automation. Many people see the flaw in this answer. What about when AI & robots can do the new jobs too, but for pennies on the dollar compared to humans? How will human-employee businesses compete?
The IMF is a major pillar of the mainstream global economic establishment. For them to come out and say this out loud is significant. It means the topic is given a credibility and urgency it hadn’t had before in national governments, the world’s central banks, etc, etc
I’m not super familiar with the inner workings of the IMF, but it does state in the notes section state that these “discussion notes” don’t reflect the opinions of the IMF, just the authors.
In addition, reports like this are always tricky. It seems to base their predictions on where people think the technology could go, rather than where it is today. For example they have professionals as the highest to be potentially impacted. This shows they are speaking about generative AI (as previous AI/ML didn’t generally touch these fields). While generative AI has been impressive, I’m not sure anyome has been able to demonstrate an substantive impact to professionals.
A counterpoint though would be something like customer service. Automation in that space over the past couple of decades has reduced the cost/number of workers, but at the cost of efficiency/efficacy. So it’s possible we may see things like AI doctors and lawyers, but potentially at a reduced quality for the average person.
Just my thoughts regarding the angle this paper/discussion notes went in.
I’m going to skim through, because I’m really wondering how they decided which things are exposed and how. The abstract makes it sound like they just went by sector, and while that’s a good simple option, I think it would miss a lot of important nuance. LLMs are set to totally wreck advertising copy writers, but only feed electrical engineering jobs. Both just look like a college education at the very coarse level.
Edit: So, they’ve broken down jobs into low-exposure, high-exposure low-complementarity and high-exposure high-complementarity, which includes all the prestige-y occupations. Then they actually do look at the fine-grained occupations level.
The one thing I find suspect is the complementarity, which I’m still looking for the sources on. It seems to me a lawyer is just as likely to be laid off as their assistant, if not more, since most of them just sit behind paperwork all day anyway, while the assistant has a name and a personality. They offer some alternate scenarios in the appendix because I guess I wasn’t the only skeptic.
In the model with no complementarity, inequality actually collapses because capital income doesn’t increase as fast as it decreases for the fancy occupations. It has problems too though - overall income goes down, which doesn’t really make sense.
Edit 2: Here’s their source. Basically, they consider which occupations are likely to be protected by legal and social factors, and then just literally adjust for prestige (“job zone”) because they figure more prestigious people will have better opportunity to adapt. Personally, I suspect they underestimate the market’s tendency to cut all corners, and overestimate their own adaptability. Thank you to anyone that actually read this far, haha.
One thing is certain. In a year the average person will be worse off than today. But at least they’ll be able to talk to their ai therapist.
That’s not a surprise. The thing most people miss is that it will create new jobs.
Its a bit like when electronics and machines hit the scene in the 20th century. You no longer see elevator boys but there are elevator technicians.
Indeed it will.
