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Artificial intelligence software may reduce job growth by 1 million to 4 million jobs each year, but create more than that, economists at Goldman Sachs said.
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Jobs whose jobs have been threatened by previous waves of automation, such as fitness instructors and real estate agents, continue to grow.
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AI can create work for people using AI, as well as increase demand for service workers by increasing income.
AI may take your job, but it may ultimately create more positions than it destroys.
At least, that’s what the economists at Goldman Sachs are banking on. Investment bank researchers published a report on Friday predicting that AI will not lead to “job losses”. Instead, they posit an optimistic case for the impact of artificial intelligence software on the labor market in which technology takes millions of jobs, but millions more are created for them, keeping unemployment low.
The article is somewhat of a rebuttal to last weekend’s viral report from Saturni Research, which outlined a scenario in which AI software replaces so many human workers that it disrupts the economy. Analysts said worries about AI-related job losses contributed to stock market volatility last week.
If the economists at Goldman Sachs are right, fears about AI causing mass unemployment are overblown.
Goldman disagreed that AI could be massively disruptive. Technology will replace 1 million to 4 million jobs annually in the coming years, wrote Joseph Briggs, global economist for Goldman. However, Goldman does not believe that AI will significantly increase the unemployment rate.
“The U.S. economy creates more than 30 million new jobs a year, and technological change is the main driver of long-term employment growth,” Briggs wrote. “We expect these dynamics to repeat and AI will create new jobs while it destroys others. That’s why we don’t anticipate job sustainability.”
AI can create jobs by improving efficiency, open new positions for people to use AI tools, and create demand for service workers by raising incomes, he wrote.
In fact, Briggs dug through economic data and found no evidence that AI has so far destroyed significant jobs outside of a few specific professions, such as software development. He also argued that just because AI can work doesn’t mean humans won’t still be needed, even for the same role, if history is any guide.
“Employment of fitness instructors (which were replaced by fitness tapes in the 1980s and even today with the proliferation of fitness apps) and real estate agents (whose role as middleman has been largely replaced by online platforms) has benefited from employment in recent years and over the past 25 years overall.”
