The Atlantic has an excellent story assessing the likely impact of artificial intelligence on the nation’s job market – both employers and employees.
An excerpt:
“This is a technology that can digest a hundred reports before you’ve finished your coffee, draft and analyze documents faster than teams of paralegals, compose music indistinguishable from the genius of a pop star or a Juilliard grad, code—really code, not just copy-paste from Stack Overflow—with the precision of a top engineer. Tasks that once required skill, judgment, and years of training are now being executed, relentlessly and indifferently, by software that learns as it goes.
“AI is already so ubiquitous that any resourceful knowledge worker can delegate some of their job’s drudgery to machines. Many companies—Microsoft and PricewaterhouseCoopers among them—have instructed their employees to increase productivity by doing just that. But anyone subcontracting tasks to AI is clever enough to imagine what might come next – a day when augmentation crosses into automation, and cognitive obsolescence compels them to seek work at a food truck, pet spa, or massage table. At least until the humanoid robots arrive.
“Many economists insist that this will all be fine. Capitalism is resilient. The arrival of the ATM famously led to the employment of more bank tellers, just as the introduction of Excel swelled the ranks of accountants and Photoshop spiked demand for graphic designers. In each case, new tech automated old tasks, increased productivity, and created jobs with higher wages than anyone could have conceived of before. The BLS projects that employment will grow 3.1 percent over the next 10 years. That’s down from 13 percent in the previous decade, but 5 million new jobs in a country with a stable population is hardly catastrophic.
“And yet: There are things that economists struggle to measure. Americans tend to derive meaning and identity from what they do. Most don’t want to do something else, even if they had any confidence – which they don’t – that they could find something else to do. Seventy-one percent of respondents to an August Reuters/Ipsos poll said they’re worried that artificial intelligence will ‘put too many people out of work permanently.’
“This data point might be easier to dismiss if the modern mill and factory owners hadn’t already declared that AI will put people out of work permanently.”
KC’s View:
I highly recommend you read the story, but don’t expect any definitive answers, nor a timeline for how fast or slow the AI revolution will have an impact on the employment sector of the economy. Some say it could be years, while others think we could see devastating job losses as soon as later this year.
This is something that retailers need to think about, and not just because AI is likely to have an impact on their bottom lines. It also is because as businesses that hold a central role in their communities and neighborhoods, the impact that AI has on local job markets could have a core role In how those businesses are perceived by the people who live in those communities and neighborhoods.
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