Different Views on Artificial Intelligence’s Effect on Getting Jobs, All From the Past Five Weeks

Within AI, the press subjects vary.  Lately, I’ve seen nothing about problems with ever-larger data feeds, and while a general backlash reaction to AI is gaining strength and attention, little specific has been out lately about its previous hot topic, data centers.  Even rundowns on specific AI achievements and its huge philosophical issues have been relatively scant.

The oldest here was “Time to ditch AI anxiety – experts say there’s a lot less to fear than we think” (Simon Constable, Fox Business, April 11^th).  As you will see, not all agreed with this thesis.  Constable started with acknowledging the amount of change, and concomitant tension, AI has wrought, and with “data from Challenger, Gray and Christmas” saying that “AI was directly involved in firing 54,000 people during 2025” (though that is hardly a huge number), moved to saying that “last year, approximately 280,000 new jobs in Gen-AI were created for people, according to Electro IQ Job Creation Stats,” that the “28.3% of the working-age population” that “used generative artificial intelligence” had become more productive, and that, ultimately, “creativity comes to life because people working with AI need to do the thinking.”  A short but clear argument.

As a solution to positions disappearing, “The AI revolution threatens office jobs, but revives demand for skilled trades” (James Altmire and Riley Burr, Fox News, April 12^th).  This is clearly happening, especially among younger career-choosers, who are also rightfully attracted to earlier paychecks, remarkably high compensation, modern-day work conditions, and, with all of that, higher prestige.  The subtitle “trade careers requiring manual dexterity, problem-solving and emotional intelligence remain beyond AI’s reach” describes the other side.  “Even if AI is able to automate some of the more routine tasks in the workplace, tradespeople are further insulated from AI-driven job displacements because of the unique need for human touch in these roles… AI algorithms may help diagnose issues, but human experts must then step in… with careful judgment, manual dexterity and complex problem-solving.”  There are reasons why trade positions have long had apprenticeships, which tells us that abstract learning is not sufficient preparation for them.  Nor will it be.

I didn’t like seeing the headline “Silicon Valley Is Bracing For a Permanent Underclass” on my May 3^rd New York Times, and that feeling didn’t improve as I read the story.  What was author Jasmine Sun trying to say?  “Most people I know in the artificial intelligence industry think the median person is screwed” – is that the median West Coast programmer, stuck in a career field endangered long before AI came to prominence?  “Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei” made self-serving “pronouncements about a white-collar blood bath” – so what?  “You feel it in the fretting of recent college graduates who apply to hundreds of jobs without landing a single interview” – so what else is new?  From a quoted “23-year-old start-up founder and Stanford dropout… There’s only a matter of time before GPT-7 comes out and eats all software and you can no longer build a software company,” and another future tool “can perform all physical labor as well” – the first is called creative destruction, and the second can most charitably be called wildly unlikely.  It may well be that Silicon Valley will become less prominent – change does happen, and it is not all favorable to everyone – but the country in general will not succumb to a failure of “society’s ability to cushion A.I.'s disruption.”  We are long past any need for reality-unsupported, obsolete-anyway screeds like this.

Perhaps the New York Times editor had a sense of humor, when, on the same date as above, there also appeared Ezra Klein’s “Why the A.I. Job Apocalypse (Probably) Won’t Happen.”  Despite unexamined-sounding predictions such as Microsoft AI’s CEO saying “that most white-collar work will be fully automated by an A.I. within the next 12 to 18 months,” “the microdata isn’t matching the anecdata:  The unemployment rate was 4.3 percent in March 2026; in March of 2020, it was 4.4 percent.  Average hourly earnings are stable.  Claude Code is a marvel, yet demand for software engineers is booming.”  Additionally, “A.I. will make knowledge plentiful,” “the more automation there is, the more people value a human’s touch,” “computers can do much that humans once did, but they didn’t put humans out of work,” as “the ability to do more made people realize there was more to do,” and, personally, “the better my A.I. has gotten the more I’ve wanted from the human beings around me – and from myself.”  A future of mass idleness indeed does not seem reasonable, so this piece is much better.

More additive AI effects are described in “How AI exposure is reshaping jobs in creative fields” (Eric Revell, Fox Business, May 4^th).  The technology is integrating here, instead of taking over.  While some roles, such as dancing and acting, don’t work as much with AI, for music directors and composers “a substantial portion of their tasks involve composition or production that AI tools may draft or modify.”  A recent study “found little evidence that generative AI has broadly reduced artists’ earnings.”  There, though, could be jobs lost by people not able to keep up with those using AI for assistance.

So, should we be concerned if “Congress Is Doing Little to Prepare for Potential A.I. Job Losses” (Ben Casselman and Tony Romm, The New York Times, May 5^th)?  “The federal safety net isn’t ready for such a shock,” presuming that displacement would be sudden and severe, but would it be?  If “unemployment insurance and other safety net programs are long overdue for an overhaul,” it could be right to do that, but the authors’ comparison with when “over just a few weeks in the spring of 2020, more than 20 million Americans lost their jobs” is weak.  Accordingly, we can go from there.  Although evidence for expecting massive AI-caused cuts is missing, the chance is more than zero, and it may be time to prepare.  Let us consider that, while still not giving in to unjustified reactions in any artificial intelligence area.