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Are you about to lose your job? At no time in polling history have Americans been less optimistic about their long-term employment prospects And the main cause of this gloom is artificial intelligence Americans aren't alone One survey of people in 19 countries found that 40% of workers fear job loss within five years due to AI and automation And 60% are concerned about machines taking over roles But they might be worrying unnecessarily The share of the working-age population in the OECD with a job is at record highs And the number of white-collar jobs in America has actually gone up by 3m since ChatGPT launched in late 2022 Economists like to use ChatGPT's launch as a convenient starting point
for studying AI's impact on the labour market But it can be misleading Those early AI tools were primitive Until fairly recently any slowdown in recruitment is unlikely to have owed much to AI The slowing in some entry-level white-collar work appears to predate ChatGPT Many firms went on a hiring binge during the pandemic when locked-down consumers were craving all things digital But as interest rates started to rise quickly in 2022 that hiring spike petered out, as firms turned to outsourcing to save costs Given how fast AI is improving it would be rash to completely dismiss people's job-loss fears But if AI really was to put millions of people out of work it would be unprecedented New technologies have never before destroyed jobs
meaningfully faster than they produced them Take the computer: in the early years it led to dire predictions of mass displacement The consequences could be dramatic- halving a workforce in a office like this because these people are replaced by a chip But this didn't happen In fact, one figure suggests that roughly half of America's employment growth between 1980 and 2010 came from the creation of entirely new occupations If changes were to happen experts should be able to see them coming The first signs would be sharply rising productivity combined with weak real-wage growth in America, the world's frontier economy As well as a recession because downturns cleanse the economy of unproductive jobs So for now try not to worry The jobs apocalypse
isn't here yet Of course in the future unemployment might be irrelevant It depends on whether AI leads to utopia or disaster It's something even the tech bros can't agree on I think it's going to be incredible, hugely positive I think there's a 25% chance that things go really, really badly Maybe we can cure all disease with the help of AI Some AI experts think there is a 5% chance of an AI-driven catastrophe by 2100 And that it's more likely than not that there will be major harm in the next 25 years- a so-called AI Chernobyl But nearly 70% believe good outcomes from superhuman AI are more likely than bad Looking at the positives there could be an explosion of economic growth If AI can bring about technological advances without human input
the world could get much richer, much faster, than ever before According to one bullish projection annual growth could exceed 20% once AI can carry out 30% of tasks It could help to eradicate some diseases One lab at MIT is using AI to target antibiotic-resistant diseases such as MRSA AI could also open up society, helping children gain equal access to education Giving every child the kind of upbringing previously available only to the rich, with private tutors, personalised syllabuses and bespoke entertainment In Nigeria, for example, pupils in a six-week after-school scheme used a chatbot twice a week and found it boosted English scores by the equivalent of nearly two years extra schooling However, for all the positive impacts
AI could provide many still fear a more doomsday-style outcome Philosophers have long worried that AI could end up accidentally destroying humanity by doggedly pursuing its task to extreme ends, hoovering up resources humanity needs in the process Even if the task were as innocuous as creating paperclips There are also concerns over recursive self-improvement: the capacity of AI to rewrite its own code to become more capable without human intervention or knowledge In February 2026 Anthropic warned that this may already be happening AI doomers also argue the economy would need to be redesigned Countries would struggle if the model of taxing workers collapses This dystopian possibility is behind Silicon Valley's warnings that state intervention
and perhaps a universal basic income will be necessary In all probability, though the future will be more of a middle ground People like having human interaction, so it's unlikely that all jobs will disappear Whatever happens with the pace of AI development we won't be in the dark for much longer
