I, Unemployed - Part One - The Future of AI in the Job Market
Think about this for a second, across the breadth of human history, there have been many technological advances that allowed us as a species to flourish beyond life as nomadic tribes, as well as feed our innate propensity toward laziness. The wheel afforded humanity the ability to transport large amounts of goods and ourselves in fractions of the time and effort. Irrigation brought us agriculture, so we could settle and, by proxy, create complex societies, security, and art. The printing press led to the democratization of information, allowing what we know as a formal education to be more accessible to those less well off. And the industrial revolution was the start of our ability to mass produce goods, eventually bringing prices down for mass consumption.
On paper and long after the fact, these advances have been net wins for humanity once we eventually learn how to integrate our workforce in and around them. The assembly line, for instance, allowed us to rapidly expand as a species, but, since the industrial revolution, these advances have often come at great cost to a large minority. For example, the automation of the assembly line was a leading cause in the mass unemployment downfall of one of the United States’ most historically prosperous cities; Detroit, Michigan. Such advances over the course of time are good for our continued growth, however, when implemented prior to governmental contingencies being created to protect its workers and citizens from the inevitable drop-off in employment, these advances spell disaster for many people.
These examples are important because it’s paramount to look at the past when assessing the future. AI and robotics, like any automation technology, comes at a heavy price for those that make their living in jobs that repetitive tasks are the largest part of; and with these two advancements specifically, the number and type of jobs at risk are far beyond anything we have encountered before. This assessment can be done across most industries, but for ease of explanation we’ll look at a single industry for now, the book publishing industry. Once AI reaches a threshold of intelligence deemed competent enough, automation will not only include low-level clerical work or warehouse operations, but jobs that, up until recently, only humans functioning as higher level publishing staff could take on, but we’ll get to the specifics on that in part two.
For now, I’m going to hit you with some numbers and statistics. As a non-maths person, this sort of thing makes my eyes glaze over, but it’s important to recognize the trends of what is happening. Statisticians have already been theorizing an astronomical ~400-800 million jobs lost to the implementation of AI by 2030, it’s showing itself to be an ever present threat to most industries and the human beings that rely on that income to live. Due to the exponential improvement in the function of AI and robotics, and the consistent iteration in new models of each that take on different kinds of tasks, that already large number could change to be far greater in the future. If left unchecked, in book publishing alone, given that AI models already exist that tout things like the ability to create, edit, and publish novels through their platform, we are looking at a potential repeat of what happened in Detroit en masse, where the already diminishing middle-class creates an even larger divide between the rich and the poor. Think like a CEO for two seconds and you'll realize that creating, editing, and publishing are the bulk of the work for a publisher, with the added benefit of generative AI to replace the writer. So, with one program, you, as CEO, can replace the majority of your workers in one fell swoop.
With the average working age population at roughly 3.5 billion people worldwide per year, a layoff statistic of up to ~800 million has the potentiality to put the overall unemployment rate of working people in 2030 at ~22.85%; that is ~16.34% higher than the recorded high in the worldwide unemployment rate of 6.59% during the pandemic in 2020 where ~230 million people were out of work.
All of this is a big deal, and the conversation should be much louder than it is. However, because I’ve spent the last six years since the pandemic struggling to survive and find work, I’ve had a front row seat to seeing the majority of my options stripped away from me. If you haven’t seen this happening, that’s not surprising, largely these things have been happening out of sight, mostly in technology and distribution sectors, but it will break out of those niches soon, and in part two of this series, I will be breaking down some of the jobs that will be at risk and why.
All of that said, I’ll see you next time to discuss specifics, but in the meantime, I encourage you to donate to the Fund for Guaranteed Income, a fund that helps displaced workers in times of need:
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