{"text":[[{"start":5.95,"text":"If you have read any of the dozens of reports into occupational exposure to AI produced of late, you will be familiar with the story: AI will destroy huge numbers of jobs in the knowledge economy, and we know this because of the particular tasks it is good at."}],[{"start":21.05,"text":"But history tells us that whether new technologies lead to falling, flat or even rising employment depends on a huge number of factors. These can be neatly illustrated by a walk through the different ways that one particular technological wave — the rise of the internet and software — has played out in recent decades."}],[{"start":40.95,"text":"An often overlooked question is whether there is such pent-up demand for a product or service that, when it becomes cheaper and more abundant, consumption rises at an even faster pace. Large increases in software productivity since the 1990s were accompanied by rising, not falling, employment in web development: the explosion in demand for software far outstripped the reduction in the amount of labour required for a given amount of code production. "}],[{"start":67.45,"text":"It has been a comparable but less dramatic story for most professional services. Software has made accountants, architects and advertising creatives more productive, but larger rises in appetite for their services mean employment has also risen."}],[{"start":null,"text":"
"}],[{"start":82.60000000000001,"text":"High-tech pockets of healthcare show a similar pattern, with innovations — now including AI — producing dramatic efficiency gains in lab testing and diagnostic imaging, all while employment in these specialisms continues to rise as the population takes advantage of more and better healthcare. The case of diagnostic imaging illustrates another important factor missed by a simple AI-can-do-this framing: one factor contributing to radiologists’ insulation from job losses is that regulations and insurance mean that fully automated radiology is de facto prohibited — even though AI systems now often outperform human professionals. This example provides a useful way for thinking about how AI may affect lawyers, too."}],[{"start":124.20000000000002,"text":"By contrast, economist James Bessen shows that demand for most manufactured goods today has been largely satiated, so productivity gains in manufacturing have tended to translate into falling rather than rising employment (global trade competition has of course played a role too)."}],[{"start":141.50000000000003,"text":"If we turn our attention to the retail and logistics sectors, we can see how the second-order effects of new technologies sometimes have dramatic and sharply contrasting impacts on particular sectors and jobs. The same digital boom that boosted knowledge workers has hollowed out employment in retail — not because shop assistants were replaced by robots, but because the internet and mobile phones sent commerce from bricks-and-mortar stores to websites. But this in turn boosted employment in logistics and warehousing, since more ecommerce means more off-site storage, distribution and deliveries."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":178.35000000000002,"text":"There are also ample examples of the same technology having diverging impacts on different occupations within the same sector. Take spreadsheets, which took off in the 1980s with a catastrophic effect on bookkeeping and accounting clerks even as they supercharged the numbers of accountants and other financial and data analysts. "}],[{"start":197.45000000000002,"text":"If AI — at least in the medium term — is another technology that augments the role of knowledge workers by enabling them to automate work previously done by lower-paid colleagues, the conventional wisdom that it is a bigger threat to the highest paid may be back to front."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":213.3,"text":"Some of the most dramatic examples of technology-driven occupational destruction come in the least predictable ways. Economics writer David Oks astutely points out that while bank tellers survived the arrival of the ATM, they were dealt a fatal blow by the smartphone: mobile banking obviated the need for in-person visits to a branch, ushering in the cashless society. Similarly, few foresaw how the internet would undermine newspapers’ business model through the boom in online advertising and the role of search engines."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":245.4,"text":"“Can AI do this task?” is a useful starting point for thinking about how it might impact employment, but it is an ambiguous signal that forms only one part of a large and complex picture. Considering the other factors that can shape job growth, directly or indirectly, helps to explain why thus far those occupations that are most exposed to AI are as likely to have grown as to have shrunk."}],[{"start":269.95,"text":"john.burn-murdoch@ft.com, @jburnmurdoch"}],[{"start":282.35,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1777094808_8658.mp3"}