AI Not Affecting Job Market Much So Far, New York Fed Says (usnews.com) 28
Rising adoption of AI technology by firms in the Federal Reserve's New York district has not been much of a job-killer so far, the regional Fed bank said in a blog on Thursday. Reuters: "Businesses reported a notable increase in AI use over the past year, yet very few firms reported AI-induced layoffs," New York Fed economists wrote in the blog. "Indeed, for those already employed, our results indicate AI is more likely to result in retraining than job loss, similar to our findings from last year," and so far the technology does not point to "significant reductions in employment."
There has been broad concern that AI could create major headwinds for hiring in the coming years, with the technology hitting highly-paid professional and managerial jobs the hardest. Investors are plowing cash into AI investments at a time when employment has already begun to show some softness, although job market changes related to AI will almost certainly play out over a long time horizon. The New York Fed blog noted that the modest impact on jobs so far may not hold in the future. "Looking ahead, firms anticipate more significant layoffs and scaled-back hiring as they continue to integrate AI into their operations," New York Fed researchers wrote.
There has been broad concern that AI could create major headwinds for hiring in the coming years, with the technology hitting highly-paid professional and managerial jobs the hardest. Investors are plowing cash into AI investments at a time when employment has already begun to show some softness, although job market changes related to AI will almost certainly play out over a long time horizon. The New York Fed blog noted that the modest impact on jobs so far may not hold in the future. "Looking ahead, firms anticipate more significant layoffs and scaled-back hiring as they continue to integrate AI into their operations," New York Fed researchers wrote.
See Below (Score:2)
Re:See Below (Score:4, Insightful)
So, one source (the New York Fed) cites actual statistics, while the other (Robinhood CEO) is prognosticating based on nothing more than wild dreams. It seems clear which take has more substance.
Re: See Below (Score:3)
More and more groups are seeing either appease the current POTUS or stick to your integrity, and unfortunately integrity doesn't bring in the paycheck. This really hurts the trust factor about the numbers given here. Distortion of facts isn't too hard when your livelihood is on the line.
Re: (Score:2)
Trump has not *yet* managed to change the way the Fed or BLS operate. He is trying, yes, but he hasn't yet had a direct impact.
Regardless, Robin Hood CEO's remarks remain nothing more than hot air.
Re: (Score:2)
It's even worse: the Robin Hood CEO even has vested interest in saying what he says.
We have the numbers already (Score:2)
The job numbers, labor force size, labor force participation rate, death/birth index and more are already collected.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) does surveys for lots of its data. That was the method done in the 1970s and earlier, over 50 years ago.
Some data sources
- Social security and medicare tax withholding - done monthly by employers
- State level sign-ups needed when a person takes a new job. There is a form filed at the state level, per federal law, to locate persons owing different types of
Obviously..... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
I think you're saying this factually, and not sarcastically. That being the case, I agree.
Regardless, tens of thousands of jobs sounds like a lot, until you look at the overall white collar job marketplace, which stands at about 70 million, according to BLS. There was a huge spike in white collar hiring in 2021-2, making the current market seem dreadful by comparison. But overall, the white collar job market is still quite healthy.
Defined the word disrupt (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
It disrupts the job market, as $hypeproduct of $startup disrupts whatever market $startup is targeting.
Everyone likes to claim to disrupt something and most the time they only disrupt hot air.
New technology always Disrupts jobs, not eliminate (Score:4, Interesting)
When new technology comes along it always gets people fired/layed off. But it does not, cannot reduce the number of jobs. People have to find the already existing jobs that were not being filled before and fill them.
There are always more jobs, because jobs are not created or destroyed by technology or by rich people. There is no such thing as a 'job creator'.
Jobs are created by human desires, and boy are we greedy sobs. There is always another job out there. Something people want done that we cannot do ourselves. New technology also creates new industries that could not exist without the same technology that destroyed the old jobs.
1,000 years ago the wine industry had vineyards, bottlers, and distributors. Now we have Sommeliers, wine bars, wine clubs, a ton of wine related products people make and sell, wine tastings, etc. etc. etc.
New technology disrupts the job market, it does not destroy jobs, ever.
Re: (Score:2)
Trump is making sure there's plenty of job openings for former programmers at Apple to go pick apples. A job for a job, you know. Not like there's any difference in what kind of job you're doing, surely they all pay the same and are equally engaging.
So not really (Score:5, Insightful)
So after the industrial revolutions no, people didn't just go get new jobs. There was a lot of technological unemployment.
It took the destruction and innovation from world war 1 and 2 to get us back to full employment. The luddites didn't have jobs lined up a few weeks after the factories started kicking them out...
You can draw a pretty reasonable through line between the social upheaval and technological unemployment of the two industrial revolutions and the two world wars we fought.
And that was at a time when they were still lots and lots of land for human beings to expand into. We have a lot of land but the really useful and valuable stuff is pretty much all been claimed. There's enough of it but it's all owned by somebody so that doesn't really matter.
We are probably going to go into a third world war soon. If you're under 65 probably in your life time.
Machine learning and llms are about to cause wide scale technological unemployment whether we like it or not. It's not going to be huge numbers but it doesn't have to be. You only need to create a permanent unemployed class of around 10% to start causing major issues that turn into wars.
If you pull up an old CIA manual you will find that if you have a discontented class of people that's around 7 to 10%, they can be used to foment revolutions and wars in a country. Below that number and they don't have enough political power to really cause any problem and above that number they can usually get political change enacted.
Ironically if ai and llms took more jobs they would probably cause less social upheaval because those people would have enough political power by the sheer weight of numbers to demand societal changes and to start moving us to a cooperative society instead of a competitive one.
That's the real problem, we're going to have two classes of people the people we need to work and the people we have no work for. And those people are going to start killing each other. Regardless of which side you end up on you're going to get dragged into that if you have anything less than a billion dollars in your bank account
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I disagree. From the past 15 years of job statistics, I see a steady decrease of paid work at the speed of 0.4% of total population per year. The drop is especially high in manufacturing and in the health care there is even increase of work.
And I have a reason for this. It is not that we are running out of work or jobs. We are running out of paying customers. I like to think it so that humans have some basic needs like food, shelter, health, entertainment etc.
- For food, as we know, automation has transform
Re: New technology always Disrupts jobs, not elimi (Score:2)
Past trends are not necessarily future trends. As a thought experiment suppose the smartest bots could out-work the dumbest humans. Those humans would be unemployable. We can't all become pole dancers. And bots would continue to get smarter over time.
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I suspect you are correct in this, however new tech definitely changes the market value for various kinds of labor.
cancels out (Score:2)
Probably all the jobs lost because "we now let AI do that!" are cancelled out by the jobs gained "we need to hire somebody to check the AIs work and fix all the problems it has!"
Tariffs (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Wait, are you implying that corporations do long-term planning? I thought they only looked ahead 1-2 quarters!
As expected (Score:2)
Genuine progress is being made in developing useful AI tools
Also, a lot of really silly uses are being found
Hypemongers, pundits and other assorted weasels make exaggerated claims that AI will allow companies to replace all of their workers
Investment flows abundantly
Executives believe salesweasels and buy expensive, immature products
The promised results fail to materialize
Meanwhile, expert workers find real uses for the tech on their own
I watch the show with amusement
Re: (Score:2)
Genuine progress is being made in developing useful AI tools....
The biggest useful advance I've seen in so-called AI is the ever increasing use of the phrase, "I want to talk to a person!"
Since hiring is massively slow (Score:2)
Of course not effecting, hiring has slowed to a snail pace....
Facts vs. fears (Score:2)
When there's a new, super-hyped technology, fears always run rampant. Facts generally don't turn out to be as good as the hype, or as bad as the fears.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep. Always the same crap with the human race. No insight, but hyped or panicked.
Interesting (Score:2)
Hence AI does provide a good pretext for firing people, but not a good reason.
AI is a long running joke (Score:2)
... The Fed didn't get it. Please don't ruin the joke by throwing in some statistics into it. Unless it's part of the act and I didn't get it.