Which workers will lose their jobs to AI?

Amid layoffs at Microsoft and other large tech companies, experts are debating whose jobs are most likely to be spared, writes Noam Scheiber from Washington, DC

- Noam Scheiber

When Amazon’s chief executive, Andy Jassy, wrote last month that he expected the company’s use of artificial intelligence to “reduce our total work force” over the next few years, it confirmed the fear among many workers that AI would replace them.

The fear was reinforced two weeks later when Microsoft said it was laying off about 9,000 people, roughly 4% of its work force.

That artificial intelligence is poised to displace white-collar workers is indisputable. But what kind of workers, exactly? Mr Jassy’s announcement landed in the middle of a debate over just this question.

Some experts argue that AI is most likely to affect novice workers, whose tasks are generally simplest and therefore easiest to automate. Dario Amodei, the chief executive of the AI company Anthropic, recently told Axios that the technology could cannibalise half of all entry-level white-collar roles within five years. An uptick in the unemployment rate for recent college graduates has aggravated this concern, even if it doesn’t prove that AI is the cause of their job-market struggles.

But other captains of the AI industry have taken the opposite view, arguing that younger workers are likely to benefit from AI and that experienced workers will ultimately be more vulnerable. In an interview at a New York Times event in late June, Brad Lightcap, the chief operating officer of OpenAI, suggested that the technology could pose problems for "a class of worker that I think is more tenured, is more oriented towards a routine in a certain way of doing things."

The ultimate answer to this question will have vast implications. If entry-level jobs are most at risk, it could require a rethinking of how we educate college students, or even the value of college itself. And if older workers are most at risk, it could lead to economic and even political instability as large-scale layoffs become a persistent feature of the labour market.