A hot topic ever since AI jumped up to the headlines, a few years ago, is still drawing ink.
“California’s
Governor Signs A.I. Order Aimed at Protecting Workers” (Cecilia Kang, The
New York Times, May 21st) related not quite that, but one intended
“to explore a broad overhaul of labor policies, an attempt to front run a
potential mass job displacement caused by artificial intelligence.” One thing it did nail down, though, was “an
expansion of job training programs, particularly for white-collar workers like
customer service representatives, software developers and marketing and sales
people.” With one overlap there are “The
Hidden Workers Most Threatened by A.I.” (Ben Casselman, The New York Times,
June 10th,” which also included “bookkeepers, payroll clerks and
human resources specialists who fly under the radar but collectively account
for tens of millions of jobs.” Although
a researcher said she was concerned that “A.I. will be to high-school-educated
women what deindustrialization was to high-school-educated men,” but, as “there
is little firm evidence that A.I. has hurt the labor market as a whole,” “such
an outcome is a fear, not a forecast.”
Parallel to
the conflict above was that “53% of Americans fear AI could take their jobs,
poll finds” (Rachel Barber, USA Today, June 10th). That number actually included worry about
“someone in their household,” and was “consistent across age, gender and
education levels, though Democrats were more likely than Republicans to express
concern.”
Also, “Big
Companies Aim to East A.I. Transition for American Workers” (Lydia DePillis, The
New York Times, June 25th).
Although “the White House, excited about the upside for stocks and
investment, has downplayed the potential for widespread job losses,” “a group
of employers, state governors and foundations has raised $500 million to” come
up with conclusions about what AI regulation we need. The consortium, Raise Us, “will work
primarily with governors, starting with those in Utah, Arkansas, Maryland and
Connecticut,” and “plans to furnish technical assistance for companies that
want to retain workers as A.I. changes their roles, rather than eliminating
them.” Valuable, especially if others,
as I noted recently, continue dragging their feet on this critical issue.
What is
happening now? Ben Casselman, in the New
York Times, said that “A.I. Is Reshaping the Economy. Good Luck Measuring How” (July 2nd). Although “pretty much everyone agrees that
artificial intelligence has the potential to reshape the economy in the coming
decades… no one is sure what effect the technology is having right now.” “According to some measures, A.I. is
contributing to high unemployment rates among new graduates and might already
have destroyed tens of thousands of jobs.
Other sources suggest companies might actually be adding workers as a
result of the technology.” It “might be
contributing to the U.S. inflation problem, or part of the solution to
it.” As well, “it might be responsible
for a recent pickup in productivity growth, or might be playing virtually no
role.” And, if these possibilities seem
easier to choose between, “researchers can’t even agree on basic questions like
how many companies are using A.I. or which workers are most vulnerable to the
disruptions it could cause.” What a
mess! It is no surprise, then, that a
think tank director “published a report documenting the challenge of A.I.
measurement and proposing steps to improve it.”
In the meantime, per an economist, “it’s like going to the doctor and
getting three different diagnoses for the same condition.”
What is “The
Work of Helping A.I. Destroy Work” (Lora Kelley, also in the Times, July
10th)? “Every day, Mercor, a
start-up that sells training data to artificial intelligence companies, pays
30,000 contractors more than $4 million to help make their jobs, and those of
their colleagues, obsolete.” The people
Mercor needs are highly specific, such as “a voice actor able to maintain a
customer service persona in fluent Hebrew,” “a Ph.D. physicist with a
specialization in general relativity, astrophysics or cosmology,” and “a
physician with more than three years of experience in the Rwandan primary care
medical system.” If the company gets the
gig workers they need, there will be some obscure corners with remarkably high-quality
AI interactions.
As expected,
changes that affect people get reactions, such as what Jessica Grose wrote
about: “The Hunt for a Job Has Never
Been Worse. These Applicants Are
Fighting Back” (The New York Times, July 18th). She called our current setup “the purgatory
job market of 2026, in which potential employees are largely evaluated by
automated systems, engage in chatbot interviews and, even then, often get no
feedback.” The problem is that “as
employers continue to use A.I. to rationalize the process of identifying strong
applicants, applicants have begun to use similar tools to game the systems
evaluating them,” creating a “vicious cycle” of “a futile “Spy vs. Spy”
showdown instead of a useful way to meet the ostensible goal of giving
qualified people jobs.” As laziness is a
powerful force, I do not expect much relief through in-person involvement here,
so we can expect more bad times for both jobseekers and employers, who “are
still having trouble finding genuinely skilled and appropriate employees” while
getting “way too many résumés to evaluate.”
The common
thread, then, is that AI is rarely helping people get jobs. Will that continue indefinitely? Will it somehow improve? I doubt it, and think we can expect this
situation to further feed AI discontent.
So this is another thing artificial intelligence must improve on. Don’t count on it.
