AI’s Impact on Jobs is More Nuanced Than Predicted

A new study highlights that AI adds jobs rather than destroys them

As technology becomes more deeply integrated into everyone’s daily life, the growing prominence of AI has sparked extensive discussions about its impact on the job market. This is not new, but has recently reached a fever pitch, as Open AI’s chatGPT has made AI’s potential much easier to grasp. Most people (myself included) seem to think that AIs will replace jobs en masse. Why wouldn’t it, since it can do the exact same tasks a human can, sometimes better?

Stefania Albanesi, António Dias da Silva, Juan Francisco Jimeno, Ana Lamo, and Alena Wabitsch, who recently authored a paper titled “Reports of AI ending human labour may be greatly exaggerated”, seem to think otherwise. The paper explores the effects of AI-enabled technologies on jobs and wages in 16 European countries from 2011–2019. It employs data from Eurostat’s Labour Force Survey and uses two proxies to measure potential AI-enabled automation: the AI Occupational Impact (“which links advances in specific applications of AI to abilities required for each occupation”) and a measure of “exposure” to AI.

Intriguingly, the study found that occupations more exposed to AI technologies actually saw an increase in employment share. Specifically, a…