Few fears have taken hold of the public imagination quite like the specter of AI-driven unemployment. A recent survey by the think tank Data for Progress found that a majority of US voters think AI is likely to increase unemployment rates, a scenario that often feels like it’s playing out in the horrid job market.
It makes a compelling narrative. Yet in a recent article published in Fortune, New York University cognitive scientist emeritus and prominent AI critic Gary Marcus makes a strong case in the opposite direction: that AI isn’t coming for anyone’s job anytime soon.
Plenty of the fear mongering, Marcus writes, comes down to good ol’ propaganda. The AI industry, for example, wants you to believe that artificial general intelligence — a still-theoretical form of AI with intellectual capabilities that rival or surpass that of humans — is either already here, or just around the corner.
As Marcus notes, this kind of AI remains firmly in the realm of science fiction, regardless of what tech executives would like anybody to believe. “[T]hey might be covering their bases in case that actually happens,” he writes, “but then again, maybe they just want you to drive up the valuations of their companies.”
The math on AI-driven unemployment likewise doesn’t add up, Marcus writes, including that by AI companies themselves. Take Anthropic, the company behind the AI chatbot Claude: its CEO Dario Amodei has made a spectacle of himself warning of a growing AI job apocalypse, even though his company’s own research department found “no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022.”
What’s really happening, Marcus argues, is that corporations are AI-washing their investor reports to cash in on the hype. “In many cases AI may be serving as a fig leaf to cover layoffs that are actually driven by financial underperformance or earlier overhiring,” he explains.
Where mass layoffs are explicitly blamed on AI, they tend not to last, like at the finance tech company Klarna, which had to reverse course on its decision to automate customer service workers just 11 months after it declared them obsolete.
Unfortunately for anyone praying for a cyberpunk future, so far the AI apocalypse seems to have landed with a wet plop. Luckily, there are plenty of real life crises to keep us occupied until the singularity ever comes — if it does at all, that is.
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