Beutah Maroko M.

Seventh and last question on AI. Can AI really help us create as many jobs as it will replace? The AI industry offers two narratives at once. The first emphasizes that because of AI’s capabilities, there will be a lot of job loss, and soon. Anthropic’s co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei is particularly vocal on this: cnbc.com/2026/01/27/dario-am… The second claims that AI will also enable lots of new jobs, so we should not fear joblessness, higher unemployment, and humans being sidelined (see, for example, Jensen Huang, fortune.com/2026/09/01/nvidi… or Marc Andreessen, digitaltoday.co.kr/en/view/4…). A lot hinges on this question. Sizable job displacement is costly for workers and could destabilize our already ailing democracy. Displacements from robots and cheap Chinese imports in the 1990s and 2000s in the United States, which were smaller than the projected job losses from AI, contributed significantly to declining trust in government and institutions (see my book What Happened to Liberal Democracy, penguinrandomhouse.com/books…, on this). Our democracy may not be able to survive another massive job dislocation. I am worried about job loss, for two fundamental reasons. AI is currently being developed as an automation technology and in addition, I do not find the arguments about large numbers of jobs being created by AI particularly realistic. (I’ll come back below to how AI could create jobs if it weren’t developed as an automation technology). Proponents of the job creation side fall back on four general arguments, none of which is convincing in my assessment. First, new technologies have always created lots of jobs. True, but that does not guarantee that this time will be the same. And more importantly, this account neglects the richer details about different historical episodes. In a nutshell, automation technologies by themselves need not create jobs (though they can, depending on circumstances and how productive they are). They involve capital substituting for tasks previously performed by workers. The way they would create jobs is that the displaced workers would go and take non-automated jobs in other parts of the economy. This can happen, but it also depresses wages (or at the very least the labor share), and consequently, some of the workers may be discouraged from looking for work or may not have the skills that remaining non-automated tasks require. This, in any case, is what task-based models predict. See, for example: aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.12… and onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/…. The empirical evidence also casts doubt on plentiful job creation taking place automatically. For example, the introduction of robots led to many fewer jobs in local economies that depended on blue-collar jobs in robot-heavy industries (and this effect was quantitatively large; one more robot per thousand industrial workers reduced the employment population ratio in the local economy by about 2 percentage points and local wages by 0.42% between 1990 and 2007). See journals.uchicago.edu/doi/fu…. Second, AI will increase productivity and higher productivity will lead to more jobs. But this argument suffers from the same weakness as the previous one: higher productivity will trigger job creation only in remaining non-automated tasks (unless there are new tasks, which I discuss below). If wages are depressed and workers don’t have the skills for these non-automated tasks, even with higher productivity, there will not be AI-driven job creation. Third, AI will need a lot of supporting roles, such as people to train the AI models. This one is the weakest argument of all. If AI is indeed an automation technology, then the whole point is to save labor costs. By the same logic, the labor needed to train AI must be much less than the labor AI ultimately saves. For this reason, I see essentially no chance that there training and maintaining AI will create anywhere near as many jobs as AI replaces. Fourth, AI is already complementing workers. This argument is based on some evidence that many workers are using AI in their jobs – see, for example, thefp.com/p/ai-jobs-unemploy…. However, the mere fact that workers are using AI in their jobs doesn’t establish that new jobs will be plentiful. The theory here is again quite clear (see the detailed treatment of this issue here, nber.org/papers/w32872). If AI simply makes workers more productive in the tasks that they used to perform already, it will drive down task prices. If you are the only worker using AI, this will benefit you. If all workers like you start using AI, then the skills on which you depend become commodified. This is what happened, for example, to London black cab drivers, whose highly-valuable knowledge of London streets was commodified when GPS technology enabled minicabs, and then later Uber drivers, to perform the same tasks as effectively. To put it simply, it isn’t enough for AI to make workers more productive at the tasks that they are performing already. This brings me to how AI could create a lot of jobs. Again, the task-based framework provides the answer here: new technologies create jobs, and in fact well-paying jobs, if they enable new tasks (either in the same industry or in new industries). I have argued elsewhere that AI has this potential as a powerful information technology. See, for example, brookings.edu/articles/build…. But this isn’t currently the direction in which AI is being developed. Hence, on its current trajectory I remain quite concerned about future job losses (and wage declines) from AI. Of course, things may turn out differently. But if they do, it will be because AI becomes more pro-worker. I see this as unlikely, but it is useful to still consider the scenarios that would bring such an outcome. These are: (1) current AI technologies may become turn out pro-worker than I am anticipating; (2) in the future the industry will automatically and by itself change and focus on pro-worker applications; (3) based on AI-driven science and research, new sectors will be created where there will be need for new workers. I’m not optimistic about any of these possibilities, and therefore my conclusion is that AI is likely to lead to more jobs being lost than gained. (But I do think there are policies that would encourage pro-worker AI; see, for example, nature.com/articles/d41586-0…). That being said, I don’t think the job loss will happen very quickly, because as I discussed in an earlier post (third question), the diffusion of AI is relatively slow. But this also implies the productivity gains from AI will be slow in coming.