The impact of artificial intelligence on the labor market has clearly been better than feared, tells The Economist. The magazine calculates that artificial intelligence has created one million new jobs so far. That’s many times over the 200,000 redundancies AI is believed to have caused after mid-2023.
Recent data supports the journal’s conclusions. Almost 162,000 jobs were created in the United States in August, clearly more than expected. During the last half century, the unemployment rate, 4.1 percent, has been lower less often than in one monthly report out of ten.
While U.S. companies have reported cutting an average of 16,000 jobs per month this year due to AI, that’s just a drop in the ocean: in a typical month, 1.7 million jobs are lost across the entire U.S. labor market.
Demand is growing in many areas
Substitute jobs have been created for the construction and ramp-up of artificial intelligence infrastructure. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics also predicts that until 2035, energy and water supply will grow the fastest among large industries. The competition for employees is also reflected in wages: according to the newspaper, the reported wages for maintenance and installation work in data centers are 40 percent higher than for similar jobs elsewhere.
The trend is also positive in expert professions closest to the artificial intelligence boom. In recent years, the number of jobs for engineers, software developers, mathematicians and data scientists has grown by about 730,000 more than the general trend would suggest. The figure is based on The Economistin to your own analysis – although the magazine points out that not all of these new jobs are necessarily directly the result of artificial intelligence.
In addition, the productivity improvement resulting from artificial intelligence can also be reflected in new jobs. The magazine gives examples of lawyers who can draft contracts faster, and analysts who can rake through earnings reports in just minutes. However, in certain fields based on routine tasks, such as customer service and assistant jobs, employment has decreased.
“If higher productivity lowers the costs of professional services, it is possible that their demand will increase enough to create more work overall,” reads the paper’s analysis.