The Potential Impact of Large Language Models on Jobs

As usual a great piece by Irving Wladawsky-Berger here, I am following through.  Lots of good links, but these are available through the link below.

The Potential Impact of Large Language Models on Jobs

Throughout the Industrial Revolution there were periodic panics about the impact of automation on jobs, going back to the Luddites, - textile workers who in the 1810s smashed the new machines that were threatening their jobs. But each time those fears arose in the past, technology advances ended up creating more jobs than they destroyed.

Automation fears have understandbly accelerated in recent years, as our increasingly smart machines have been applied to activities requiring intelligence and cognitive capabilities that not long ago were viewed as the exclusive domain of humans. Over the past decade, powerful AI systems have matched or surpassed human levels of performance in a number of tasks such as image and speech recognition, skin cancer classification, breast cancer detection, and highly complex games like Go. More recently, large language models (LLMs) and chatbots like ChatGPT are taking AI-based automation to a whole new level.

 “OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the latest advance in a steady march of innovations that have offered the potential to transform many occupations and wipe out others, sometimes in tandem,” wrote journalists Lydia DePillis and Steve Lohr in “Tinkering With ChatGPT, Workers Wonder: Will This Take My Job?,” a recent NY Times article. “It is too early to tally the enabled and the endangered, or to gauge the overall impact on labor demand and productivity. But it seems clear that artificial intelligence will impinge on work in different ways than previous waves of technology.” In particular, AI is now “confronting white-collar professionals more directly than ever. It could make them more productive — or obsolete.”

“Artificial intelligence and machine learning have been operating in the background of many businesses for years, helping to evaluate large numbers of possible decisions and better align supply with demand, for example,” the article added. “ChatGPT, however, is the first to confront such a broad range of white-collar workers so directly, and to be so accessible that people could use it in their own jobs. And it is improving rapidly, with a new edition released this month.”

In the past few decades, the jobs most susceptible to automation were blue-collar occupations in manufacturing industries, and white-collar occupations like accounting and record keeping. At the same time, jobs that required the kinds of non-routine problem solving and complex communications skills typically seen in managerial, professional and technical occupations significantly expanded with the earnings of the college educated workers needed to fill them steadily rising.

How will the next few decades play out given the potential wider scope of AI-based automation, including the jobs of high-skilled, highly educated professionals. Will continuing advances in AI end up eliminating more jobs than they create?

In the spring of 2018, then MIT president Rafael Reif commissioned a major MIT-wide task force to address the impact of AI on jobs, economies, and society in general.  After working for two years, the task force released its final report, “The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines,” in November of 2020.   ... '