Technology executives who recently warned that Artificial Intelligence could cause mass job losses are softening their forecasts. Sam Altman of OpenAI said last month that he no longer believed the technology would lead to a “jobs apocalypse”, admitting that the impact on entry-level white-collar jobs had been smaller than he expected. Dario Amodei of Anthropic has also shifted toward describing Artificial Intelligence as a force that transforms jobs rather than eliminates them. Two-thirds of the big-name economists polled by the Wall Street Journal recently predicted that Artificial Intelligence would lead to either more or the same number of jobs.
One reason is the durability of work where human involvement is part of the value being sold. Alex Imas, a professor at the Chicago Booth School of Business and director of AGI Economics at Google DeepMind, calls this the “relational sector”. It includes services where people may prefer a human even when automation is technically possible, from tailoring and luxury hospitality to nursing, teaching, care work, clergy, live music, art and cooking. As Artificial Intelligence makes production more efficient and society richer, spending may shift toward goods and services where the human touch matters, expanding demand for relational work.
Another likely area of resilience is what London School of Economics economist Luis Garicano calls “messy jobs”, where workers juggle varied tasks, respond to unpredictable problems and rely on judgment. Management consultants may use Artificial Intelligence for formatting slides or crunching data, but still need to manage client relationships, persuasion, office politics and strategic judgment. Radiologists show the same pattern: Artificial Intelligence models are now extremely good at reading medical scans, but radiologists still communicate with clinicians, explain results to patients, train juniors and handle real-world hospital complications. Legal responsibility also keeps humans central in high-stakes areas such as safety-critical engineering, law and auditing.
Jobs of the future are also hard to predict: 60% of employment in the United States in 2018 was in jobs that didn’t exist in 1940. The larger risk is not mass unemployment but disruption, with winners and losers requiring effective policy responses. The UK government has launched a new Artificial Intelligence Economics Institute to study how Artificial Intelligence is transforming the economy in the UK and beyond. The institute will be chaired by Simon Johnson, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and winner of the 2024 Nobel prize in economics.
