“AI Job Losses” So Far Largely Means “Call Center Jobs”
Your dream career of responding to angry Verizon customers may be slipping away
Two things above all cause my bullshit detector to blare like the warning system in a plane that just lost both engines:
When a company runs an ad where the message is “We love our jobs!”, as if that company’s employees aren’t engaged in the same drudgery-for-sustenance trade as every other worker on the planet;
When a single academic paper seems to be the entire evidentiary source for a narrative.
Condition #2 has recently been met: In virtually every discussion I hear about AI these days, someone references a Stanford paper that appears to have found early evidence of AI-induced job loss. Some see this finding as the canary in the coal mine for widespread job displacement, and, in fact, the paper is called “Canaries in the Coal Mine” — that’s a lack-of-subtlety that would impress Larry Flynt! The paper has been cited by Tristan Harris — one of the most prominent voices warning about the dangers of AI — and also by the Washington Post, The New York Times, CNBC, Fortune, and others. It’s become to conversations about unemployment and AI what The Simpsons is to this blog: It will be mentioned at some point, it’s just a matter of when.
The paper’s claim is that young workers in “AI-exposed” sectors have experienced a 13 percent decline in employment since the launch of Chat GPT. You can see how this supports a narrative: The Warrenite left plays the “Tech Companies are Evil” song more than Lynyrd Skynyrd plays Freebird, and it’s an article of faith among some that recent graduates are entering the worst job market since the eruption of Mount Mazama in 5,700 B.C. This is, of course, the type of situation that leads people to twist findings to fit preferred narratives, and that appears to have happened here.
