No need to fear the ‘AI reaper’

Rich Lowry writes for the New York Post about concerns surrounding the growing reliance on artificial intelligence.

ChatGPT is coming for your job.

That’s the fear about the rapid advances in artificial intelligence. 

In a headline the other day, Axios warned of a “white-collar bloodbath.”

The CEO of the artificial intelligence firm Anthropic told the publication that AI could destroy half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years and drive the unemployment rate up to 10% or 20% — or roughly Great Depression levels. 

This sounds dire, but we’ve been here before.

In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes thought that labor-saving devices were “outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor.”

Analysts thought the same thing in the 1960s, when President John F. Kennedy warned “the automation problem is as important as any we face” — and in our era, too. 

If a prediction has been consistently wrong, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will forever be wrong.

Still, we shouldn’t have much confidence in the same alarmism, repeated for the same reasons. 

If technological advance was really a net killer of jobs, the labor market should have been in decline since the invention of the wheel. 

Instead, we live in a time of technological marvels, and the unemployment rate is 4.2%.

Rob Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation points out that the average unemployment rate in the United States hasn’t changed much over the last century, despite productivity — the ability to produce more with the same inputs — increasing by almost 10 times. 

Technology increases productivity, driving down costs and making it possible to invest and spend on other things, creating new jobs that replace the old.

This is the process of a society becoming wealthier, and it’s why nations that innovate are better off than those that don’t. 

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