The surprising truth about AI and jobs
From our UK edition
Lord Stockwood, the minister for investment, recently floated the idea of universal basic income to cushion AI-driven job losses. Last month, the European Central Bank published a study of 5,000 eurozone firms showing that companies which adopt AI are 4 per cent more likely to hire. Something doesn't add up. So what’s going wrong? In 2013, a widely cited Oxford study told us that 47 per cent of American jobs were at high risk of automation. Since then, every serious forecast has done the same thing: decompose a job into tasks, score which tasks machines can do, announce a crisis. The renowned VC investor Marc Andreessen refined the point this January: it’s tasks, not jobs, that get replaced. He’s right. But he doesn’t explain why the job survives once the tasks are gone.
