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What labor historians think AI could do to some jobs

What labor historians think AI could do to some jobs
What labor historians think AI could do to some jobs


The internet has been abuzz about the introduction of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, which gained tens of millions of users within a matter of months after its fall 2022 release. Google and Microsoft are currently testing out their own generative AI tools as well. And people are nervous.

More than a third, 37% of adults are pessimistic about the future impact of AI on workers, according to a recent Jobs for the Future survey of 2,204 adults, and 25% believe AI will hurt their industry.

Changes in tech at work are nothing new. “Technology transforming how we work is just a story of at least the past 200 years since the industrial revolution,” says Aaron Benanav, assistant professor of sociology at Syracuse University.

What makes generative AI different, at least in the way it’s been widely discussed, is that it “could affect traditional professional jobs like legal services, financial services, so higher paying jobs,” says Felix Koenig, assistant professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University. And perhaps those jobs have been perceived as immune.

A recent analysis from the Pew Research Center found that jobs in which the most important tasks could be replaced or aided by AI tended to be “in higher-paying fields where a college education and analytical skills can be a plus.”

History could help predict how generative AI “might actually influence or change work in the future,” says Benanav. Here’s what historians think could be in store for some roles.

Tech could ‘turn good jobs into bad jobs’

Generative AI could change the nature and parameters of certain jobs.

Tools like ChatGPT could be used to take a complex role which one person was doing and “break that one job into five jobs or 10 jobs or even, like, 50 jobs,” says Jason Resnikoff, assistant professor of contemporary history at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Each one of these jobs would then require less skill and expertise to ultimately complete the larger project.

Resnikoff gives the example of what could happen to writers in the entertainment industry, who’ve been on strike since May 2, in part because of stalled negotiations over the use of AI in their field.

One option is “we’ll have an assembly line for a script for some TV show,” he says, adding that, “AI would produce bad dialogue, and then there’d be the dialogue finisher. And then it would produce a bad premise, and there’d be the premise coordinator. You’d have many different writers’ jobs — none of them is writer.” And each one of these jobs would, theoretically, take less skill and pay less than the current job of a writer.

Another option is “you make a two-tier system,” he says.

The top tier would be “a very thin layer of craft workers who are super well remunerated, and they work in like a boutique shop,” Resnikoff says. Second-tier workers would have “really s—– jobs and jobs that are extremely insecure.” While the first-tier writers might work on every component of a script, “all the other TV is written by a machine and all these peons working at it,” he says.

“S—– jobs,” as Resnikoff describes them, get at the core of the kind of job degradation this direction would result in. Historically, breaking up larger roles requiring a lot of skill and expertise into a series of smaller ones has allowed employers to say, “you’re doing so much less,” says Resnikoff, “so we’re going to pay you half of what you made before.”

Introducing new tech into the process has been a way “to turn good jobs into bad jobs,” he says.

One person could do a job historically done by many

‘What typically happens is new jobs emerge’

‘The future is open’

Elon Musk responds to Harvard professor Steven Pinker’s comments on A.I.: ‘Humanity is in deep trouble’

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