Amid Fears of AI Job Losses, This MIT Professor Thinks It Can Fix the Labor Market

Conflicting opinions abound over the role of artificial intelligence in the future labor market. Some surveys show more business leaders expect AI to create new jobs rather than eliminate them. But the International Monetary Fund predicts AI can replace 10 percent of the U.S. workforce, and a recent survey of managers showed some 4 in 10 hope to replace at least some of their staff with AI apps this year alone.

Technophobia may be battling technophilia here, even as AIs get cleverer by the day. However, in a recent magazine article, MIT labor economist and economics professor David Autor took a big-picture view, and suggested AI could overhaul the middle class and address some labor shortages in the U.S. workforce.

Autor’s piece in Noema magazine was just summarized neatly by the New York Times, which calls Autor a “tech contrarian” and an “unlikely AI optimist,” not least because his studies have shown “how much technology and trade have eroded the incomes of millions of American workers over the years.”

A different tech revolution 

According to Autor, the key to his optimism is that AI is a fundamentally different technology, separate from the waves of computing, automation, and robotics that have already replaced many people’s jobs. AI is perhaps more like a force multiplier, and inside their algorithms modern generative AI systems contain the distilled knowledge and expertise of millions of people. It’s how such AIs are trained–even if this is generating controversy over how much permission was needed for AI makers to grab the data from the internet (or buy it, in the case of Google and social media platform Reddit) and put it into the AIs in the first place.

Access to the information held in AIs, Autor suggests, can open “the door to new possibilities” for people looking for work. Such AI expertise will even allow more people to “take on some of the work that is now the province of elite, and expensive, experts like doctors, lawyers, software engineers and college professors.” He mentions, for example, air traffic controllers. Becoming one of those takes years of education and on-the-job training, so it’s a “scarce skill.” But being a school crossing guard generally requires no formal training or special expertise, so “an urgent need for more crossing guards could be filled by most air traffic controllers but the reverse would not be true.” 

More skills = more jobs = more pay?

Instead of replacing people’s jobs, Autor suggests access to expertise via AI will boost people’s ability to do their jobs, or take on other ones.

“AI is a tool, like a calculator or a chainsaw, and tools generally aren’t substitutes for expertise but rather levers for its application,” he says. The practical upshot of this is that if more people “can do more valuable work, they should be paid more.” His conclusion is that AI will thus lift “more workers into the middle class.”

While Autor’s ideas point toward a sort of Star Trek-like utopian future where people, with the benefit of AI tech, can learn any skill and thus do most any job, they rest on at least one big assumption. Will all people want to learn more complex jobs, even if there’s the offer of more pay?

New jobs in AI

At the least, Autor’s theories are the opposite of the sort of “jobs apocalypse” or “civilizational destruction” tech leader Elon Musk foresees. They are also a neat alternative to the sort of dramatic “societal misalignments” that OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman warns AI could bring about. Instead, Autor’s view is aligned with news that the AI jobs market is so hot right now that Meta is hiring people with AI backgrounds without even interviewing them. 

This writer asked Microsoft’s Copilot AI about the future, and it said, among a long list of theories, “Rather than solely taking jobs away, AI is likely to create new ones.” It also said, “Adaptation, upskilling, and embracing AI’s potential can help us navigate this transformative era.” 

Sounds like Copilot is an Autor supporter. But technophobes and AI doomsayers will pay special attention to the “us” in that final line.