Artificial Intelligence’s Effect on Getting Jobs: Different Perspectives, Different Results

On the issue of how AI is doing at helping or hindering our employment efforts, there are several things to consider.  Here they are, with looks at how it has been doing.

On the effect of its abilities to compete with employees, we saw “Which Workers Will A.I. Hurt Most:  The Young or the Experienced?” (Noam Scheiber, The New York Times, July 7^th).  That’s a matter of controversy, on whether “younger workers are likely to benefit from A.I.,” or will it “cannibalize half of all entry-level white-collar roles within five years.”  Or, could it instead, “untether valuable skills from the humans.”?  The outcome so far is split, with entry-level candidates having the most difficulty in today’s job market, but there is a lot to say for plans to “take the cheapest employee,” use AI to help them, “and make them worth the expensive employee.”

What is the technology doing to employment now?  Not much, per Walter Frick on August 10^th in Bloomberg Weekend’s “AI Is Everywhere But the Jobs Data.”  Per an Economic Innovation Group study, “US workers whose jobs involve tasks that AI can do are actually much less likely than other workers to be unemployed,” and are “much less likely to be leaving the labor force.”  Other factors are at work here, but clearly little in AI job killing has happened.

On the downside was “The 1970s Gave Us Industrial Decline.  A.I Could Bring Something Worse.” (Carl Benedikt Frey, The New York Times, August 19^th).  The author started by saying “a silent recession has arrived for recent college graduates,” and after acknowledging the results in the previous paragraph compared our current situation to what happened with Pittsburgh’s steel and Detroit’s cars in the 1960s.  He called for areas to reinvent themselves and foster innovation by paying for “amenities that attract and retain talented residents:  public spaces, fast and affordable transit, top-tier schools” and “museums and theaters.”  Those sorts of investments would not get political approval in many places, but if widespread industry damage from AI becomes obvious, they might.

A comprehensive view was the topic of “Jobs that are most at risk from AI, according to Microsoft” (Kurt Knutsson, Fox News, August 28^th).  The “Top Jobs Most at Risk From AI” turned out to be “technical writers, ticket agents and travel clerks, editors, telemarketers, broadcast announcers and radio DJs, mathematicians, political scientists, interpreters and translators, advertising sales agents, CNC tool programmers, news analysts reporters and journalists, customer service representatives, historians, farm and home management educators, business teachers postsecondary, hosts and hostesses, public relations specialists, concierges, brokerage clerks, proofreaders and copy markers, writers and authors, sales representatives (services), telephone operators, demonstrators and product promoters, passenger attendants, data scientists, market research analysts, web developers,” and “management analysts.”

The piece also included the “Jobs Least Likely to be Replaced by AI Right Now,” which were “medical equipment preparers, surgical assistants, dishwashers, roofers, massage therapists, cement masons and concrete finishers, motorboat operators, orderlies, floor sanders and finishers, bridge and lock tenders, industrial truck and tractor operators, gas compressor and pumping station operators, helpers-roofers, roustabouts, oil and gas, ophthalmic medical technicians, packaging and filling machine operators, logging equipment operators, dredge operators, pile driver operators, water treatment plant and system operators, foundry mold and coremakers, machine feeders and offbearers, rail-track maintenance equipment operators, supervisors of firefighters,” and “tire builders.”  Note that the positions here tend heavily to be lower-paying, blue-collar, and requiring less education.

I end with two articles concerning job seeking itself, which nobody can claim has been unaffected.  “Hidden risks of AI in hiring: 4 traps to avoid” (Pilar Arias, Fox Business, August 23^rd) was for potential employees, of whom “forty percent… are using artificial intelligence to improve their chances of getting hired, according to a recent report by Jobseeker.”  Destructive things they may have in cover letters include a “manufactured feel” or “stiff, formal language patterns when describing career history,” ”missing concrete examples of success” which have long been critical to the process and “AI simply can’t invent,” “unusual formatting patterns” such as “odd spacing between paragraphs, weird alignment issues or random font changes,” and “too perfect, no human touch,” clarified to mean “perfect sentences with little variation in length and structure.”

“Can AI make the job search less grueling?” Per Patrick Kulp on September 7^th in Tech Brew and interviewee Tomer Cohen of LinkedIn, it can.  As Cohen put it, “if I know more about your skill set, your aspirations, there might be a job that actually not many have applied to, but is a great opportunity for you.  So instead of a lot of job seekers applying to a few jobs… you’re able to actually spread out the supply and demand.”  As well, such a program can get the most valuable and appropriate work from AI, such as “interview prep one on one with an AI coach,” identifying missing skills which the applicant can learn, and helping less completely with cover letters. 

More than anything else, artificial intelligence’s role with jobs is evolving.  I don’t expect Microsoft’s list of jobs to change much, but other aspects of AI and employment searches may differ even from month to month.  So it is valuable to stay current as much as possible, but look for principles which are good through this area’s evolution.  That’s the best we can do.