✨😨 Bernie Sanders' misguided AI jobs panic
Senate Democrats warn artificial intelligence could erase 100 million jobs. But its ChatGPT-based analysis confuses automation with annihilation. Their plan to tax AI is what would be really harmful
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,
Senator Bernie Sanders and his Democratic colleagues on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee have issued a dire warning: Artificial intelligence could destroy nearly 100 million American jobs within a decade. Yikes! That seems like a lot! Their report, “The Big Tech Oligarchs’ War Against Workers,” claims “AI and automation” will upend the labor market on a simply massive scale.
A Great-Techno Depression, you might say. Count me very skeptical, however.
When a chatbot becomes an oracle
For starters, the report’s “analysis” seemingly rests on a gimmick, to be charitable — or a bit of Luddite legerdemain, to be less charitable. Senate Staffers asked ChatGPT which job tasks could be automated in some way, then treated those chatbot answers as evidence that real people will lose real jobs. If AI and other smart machines could, in theory, perform 60-70 percent percent of a job’s tasks — economists typically view a particular job as a bundle of discrete tasks — the authors assumed 60-70 percent percent of those workers would vanish. The methodology gets fuzzy here, so I could be wrong, but that is my good-faith reading.
That’s also, ironically and hilariously, ChatGPT’s good-faith reading! I uploaded the paper and asked the chatbot whether the report “engages in sound methodology to arrive at its conclusion.” And ChatGPT’s harsh response:
Anyway, automating a specific job task isn’t the same as eliminating a job. More often, automation of any kind changes work, boosts productivity, or spawns new kinds of roles. (Let me also add this bit of context about job market churn: Nearly 2 million jobs are eliminated every month (with typically more created.)
Goldman Sachs, for instance, estimates current AI might automate roughly a quarter of tasks in rich economies — not wipe out 60 percent of workers.
