How Vulnerable is your Job to A.I. Really?

The Pew Center report gives more data on the coming 🔥 technological automation wave. And it's not good!

Welcome Back!

This is the fourth installment in my future of work series.

I’m always trying to read and unpack reports related to A.I. and the labor force and the future of jobs. Recently, Rakesh Kochhar, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center wrote a new Pew report.

• About 1 in 5 American workers have a job with “high exposure” to artificial intelligence.

• It’s unclear if AI would enhance or displace these jobs.

• Technology has led some to “lose out” in the past, largely when their job is substituted by automation, but how will this play out exactly if LLMs turn out to be a general purpose technology?

The Pew Research Center data gives us more figures to crunch and questions to ponder. Robots and automation, for example, have become a mainstay of factory floors and assembly lines. But how does automation sneak into our white-collar tasks and what does that do to our livelihoods and careers over time?

Meanwhile according to McKinsey, nearly 12 million US workers may need to switch jobs by 2030, a McKinsey study found.

While in China, for young graduates, things may be even worse than it seems. China's official youth unemployment rate indicates around one-fifth (slightly over 20%) of 16- to 24-year olds are jobless, a Peking University professor estimated that this could be close to 50%.

GenZ seems best positioned to rapidly adopt A.I. in their daily jobs. But for some professions we know adopting A.I. just won’t be enough. In recent interview with The Atlantic, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (ChatGPT), explains that yes, artificial intelligence will eliminate jobs.

McKinsey now thinks, lower-wage workers are projected to be 14 times more likely to be impacted. But what about the impact of A.I. on white collar jobs in the coming years? The Pew Report sheds a bit more light.

“AI is distinguished from past technologies that have come over the last 100-plus years,” said Rakesh Kochhar, an expert on employment trends and a senior researcher at Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank.

Start a free trial to join me on my exposition of the report and colored with my own commentary.