Will AI take our jobs? Even for those who aren’t worried about human extinction, much of the conversation about the technology begins and ends there. A Gallup survey released last week found that 27% of American workers fear technology will make their job obsolete, a record high, and double the share in 2017.
The worry is understandable, but it is the wrong question. The right one is being answered in science, medicine and everyday work: Will AI make our lives better? It already is, and the evidence is clear once we stop looking solely at job counts.
Begin with the labor market, where AI’s effect so far has been minimal. In a recent study, my colleagues and I compared the occupations most exposed to AI—software developers, financial clerks, administrative assistants—with those least exposed. Job postings and layoffs showed no statistically significant change across industries regardless of AI exposure.
Other studies confirm our findings: AI adoption has no detectable effect on employment, earnings or hours worked, with exceptions so far confined to some entry-level jobs in the most exposed fields. Employers added 162,000 jobs in August, beating expectations, with unemployment steady at 4.1%. Four years after ChatGPT’s launch, the mass layoffs that everyone feared haven’t shown up in the data.
Now consider what the jobs debate leaves out. In 2024, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry went to three scientists for work on protein structures enabled by AI. Many medications work by binding to the shape of proteins in the body, and for more than half a century, determining that shape could require years of lab work for a single protein. Now an AI platform called AlphaFold predicts it in hours. Its makers in 2022 released the structures of almost all 200 million proteins known to science, and more than three million researchers in 190 countries have used them, a third of them to better understand disease. Years of work that once stood between a patient and a cure could see a breakthrough in an afternoon.
Continue reading at The Wall Street Journal.
Vitor Melo, PhD, is a Regulatory Policy Fellow at the Archbridge Institute and host of the institute’s “The Cause and Effect Podcast,”“ a multimedia channel that translates complex research into digestible discussion and real-world applications. His research examines the effects of labor and healthcare regulations, the political economy of government policies, and the causes of discrimination across a range of contexts. Dr. Melo received his Ph.D. in economics from Clemson University.
Economics of Flourishing
Will AI take our jobs? Even for those who aren’t worried about human extinction, much of the conversation about the technology begins and ends there. A Gallup survey released last week found that 27% of American workers fear technology will make their job obsolete, a record high, and double the share in 2017.
The worry is understandable, but it is the wrong question. The right one is being answered in science, medicine and everyday work: Will AI make our lives better? It already is, and the evidence is clear once we stop looking solely at job counts.
Begin with the labor market, where AI’s effect so far has been minimal. In a recent study, my colleagues and I compared the occupations most exposed to AI—software developers, financial clerks, administrative assistants—with those least exposed. Job postings and layoffs showed no statistically significant change across industries regardless of AI exposure.
Other studies confirm our findings: AI adoption has no detectable effect on employment, earnings or hours worked, with exceptions so far confined to some entry-level jobs in the most exposed fields. Employers added 162,000 jobs in August, beating expectations, with unemployment steady at 4.1%. Four years after ChatGPT’s launch, the mass layoffs that everyone feared haven’t shown up in the data.
Now consider what the jobs debate leaves out. In 2024, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry went to three scientists for work on protein structures enabled by AI. Many medications work by binding to the shape of proteins in the body, and for more than half a century, determining that shape could require years of lab work for a single protein. Now an AI platform called AlphaFold predicts it in hours. Its makers in 2022 released the structures of almost all 200 million proteins known to science, and more than three million researchers in 190 countries have used them, a third of them to better understand disease. Years of work that once stood between a patient and a cure could see a breakthrough in an afternoon.
Continue reading at The Wall Street Journal.
Vitor Melo
Vitor Melo, PhD, is a Regulatory Policy Fellow at the Archbridge Institute and host of the institute’s “The Cause and Effect Podcast,”“ a multimedia channel that translates complex research into digestible discussion and real-world applications. His research examines the effects of labor and healthcare regulations, the political economy of government policies, and the causes of discrimination across a range of contexts. Dr. Melo received his Ph.D. in economics from Clemson University.
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