Another job bites the dust

No single technology in modern memory has caused mass job loss among highly educated workers. Will generative AI really be an exception? No one can answer this question, given how new the technology is and given how slowly employment can adjust in response to technological change. But AI really is different, technology experts told me - a range of tasks that up until now were impossible to automate are becoming automatable.

'Before, progress was linear and predictable. You figured out the steps and the computer followed them. It followed the procedure; it didn't learn and it didn't improvise,' the MIT professor David Autor, one of the world's foremost experts on employment and technological change, told me. ChatGPT and the like do improvise, promising to destabilise - if not eliminate - a lot of white-collar jobs....

So, is AI like the smartphone or is it like an automated machine tool? Is it changing how work gets done without eliminating jobs?...


As a rule, when companies can substitute machines for people, they will. AI can do work currently done by paralegals, copywriters, digital-content producers, executive assistants, entry-level computer programmers, and, yes, some journalists. That means such jobs might change, and soon....

From 'How ChatGPT Will Destabilise White-Collar Work', The Atlantic