'The Jobs Apocalypse Is Postponed. An AI Jobs Boom Is Here' (economist.com) 63
A new article about AI in The Economist argues that "Initial effects of the technology on employment look positive."
Perhaps AI will eventually make many humans unemployable — but there is no sign of it yet. On September 4th the Bureau of Labour Statistics reported that the American economy added 162,000 jobs in August, far above expectations. The unemployment rate is just 4.1%, lower than in almost 90% of months over the past half-century. Young workers, often cast as AI's first victims, are holding up remarkably well: the gap between unemployment among 20-24-year-olds and the overall rate is close to a multi-decade low.
Some companies and workers are being severely disrupted by AI. Hiring in professional and business services is running about 10% below the average in 2015-19. Tech giants like Microsoft and Meta are trimming headcounts as they reorganise their businesses around the technology. Smaller firms such as Block, the owner of Square and Cash App, and Intuit, the maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks, are replacing people with bots. American companies have announced some 16,000 AI-related job cuts a month on average so far this year, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an employment consultancy.
But AI-related lay-offs gets lost in the churning jobs market where employers shed roughly 1.7m workers in a typical month. And the evidence so far is that AI is already creating a lot of jobs to replace those it has destroyed. The vast sums pouring into data centres and power generation have set off a race for construction and infrastructure workers. AI startups are hiring like there is no tomorrow. Incumbents racing to keep up are creating new AI roles. And by making some workers more productive, AI may be increasing demand for their services.
Add it all up, and The Economist estimates that AI has so far created around 1m new jobs in America. That easily exceeds the roughly 200,000 lay-offs attributed to AI since mid-2023, and appears more than enough to offset weaker hiring in many back-office roles.
Their article acknowledges that since January 2023 employment has fallen roughly 10% for customer-service workers and 15% for administrative assistants. But when The Economist looked at professions "closest to the AI boom" — engineers, software developers, mathematicians and data scientists — they found that since 2022 they've added roughly 730,000 jobs above trend. They see AI as creating new white-collar jobs for everyone from model and deployment engineers to new data annotators.
The chief economist at the Burning Glass Institute agrees, estimating that roughly 1% of professional jobs are now "AI jobs" — about 1 million positions in the U.S. — while in computer occupations and life sciences it's between 4% and 5%. (Data-center construction spending also increased 60% in one year, according to Census Bureau data, creating jobs for electricians, HVAC specialists, grid engineers, and machine technicians.) And "Indeed finds that installation and maintenance jobs at data centres advertise wages about 40% higher than comparable work elsewhere."
Some companies and workers are being severely disrupted by AI. Hiring in professional and business services is running about 10% below the average in 2015-19. Tech giants like Microsoft and Meta are trimming headcounts as they reorganise their businesses around the technology. Smaller firms such as Block, the owner of Square and Cash App, and Intuit, the maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks, are replacing people with bots. American companies have announced some 16,000 AI-related job cuts a month on average so far this year, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an employment consultancy.
But AI-related lay-offs gets lost in the churning jobs market where employers shed roughly 1.7m workers in a typical month. And the evidence so far is that AI is already creating a lot of jobs to replace those it has destroyed. The vast sums pouring into data centres and power generation have set off a race for construction and infrastructure workers. AI startups are hiring like there is no tomorrow. Incumbents racing to keep up are creating new AI roles. And by making some workers more productive, AI may be increasing demand for their services.
Add it all up, and The Economist estimates that AI has so far created around 1m new jobs in America. That easily exceeds the roughly 200,000 lay-offs attributed to AI since mid-2023, and appears more than enough to offset weaker hiring in many back-office roles.
Their article acknowledges that since January 2023 employment has fallen roughly 10% for customer-service workers and 15% for administrative assistants. But when The Economist looked at professions "closest to the AI boom" — engineers, software developers, mathematicians and data scientists — they found that since 2022 they've added roughly 730,000 jobs above trend. They see AI as creating new white-collar jobs for everyone from model and deployment engineers to new data annotators.
The chief economist at the Burning Glass Institute agrees, estimating that roughly 1% of professional jobs are now "AI jobs" — about 1 million positions in the U.S. — while in computer occupations and life sciences it's between 4% and 5%. (Data-center construction spending also increased 60% in one year, according to Census Bureau data, creating jobs for electricians, HVAC specialists, grid engineers, and machine technicians.) And "Indeed finds that installation and maintenance jobs at data centres advertise wages about 40% higher than comparable work elsewhere."
This makes my suspicion nipple tingle (Score:5, Insightful)
"But AI-related lay-offs gets lost in the churning jobs market where employers shed roughly 1.7m workers in a typical month. And the evidence so far is that AI is already creating a lot of jobs to replace those it has destroyed. The vast sums pouring into data centres and power generation have set off a race for construction and infrastructure workers. AI startups are hiring like there is no tomorrow. Incumbents racing to keep up are creating new AI roles. And by making some workers more productive, AI may be increasing demand for their services"
There are hard numbers on how many jobs were lost and where. Can we see hard numbers on how many jobs were created and where? If the losses are well defined, why aren't the gains well defined? I am suspicious as a) CEOs are blabbering about how great AI is left and right with no numbers, and b) the current administration is a bunch of lying cunts that would happily lie about job numbers to look good.
Re:This makes my suspicion nipple tingle (Score:5, Interesting)
goes back to the us not having serious and transparent job market stats, it's a jumble of different statistics and projections.
they do cite the datacenter boom, particularly construction. if that's going to hold as a long-term strategy and is going to keep producing stable value for the economy and in particular for the job market remains to be seen, i would be skeptical even if the bubble doesn't pop (anytime soon).
25% of U.S. workers are "functionally unemployed"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hows this for more serious job market stats? ..."
"Nearly 25% of U.S. workers are "functionally unemployed," economic analysis finds"
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/f... [cbsnews.com]
"The U.S. job market is less robust than it looks, according to a new analysis.
The nation's unemployment rate fell to 4.1% in July, well within the range economists consider healthy. Yet that measure, which reflects the percentage of people 16 and older who don't have a job and who are looking for work, is an imprecise metric that fails to offer a full picture of the health of the job sector, according to Gene Ludwig, chairman of the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP).
The economic research firm's "True Rate of Unemployment" (TRU) seeks to capture the share of workers that the group defines as "functionally unemployed." This includes not only people who are unemployed and looking for a job, but also those who are involuntarily working part-time and who are earning poverty-level wages, or less than $26,000 annually before taxes.
Functional unemployment across the U.S. has climbed four straight months and stood at 24.9% as of July, although that's down from 25.2% in December, according to the Ludwig Institute.
Shadowstats has some similar unemployment numbers:
https://www.shadowstats.com/al... [shadowstats.com]
To me, these sorts of huge (but often ignored) unemployment numbers reflect the continued playing out of larger trends like I outlined in 2010: ..."
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics"
https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-... [pdfernhout.net]
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society.
Re:25% of U.S. workers are "functionally unemploye (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a stat - I forget the name for it - but it's basically "The percentage of hours worked out of all those who would normally be expected to be working".
If you're of working age, not prevented by disability, etc., you would be counted. It can't be fudged by not counting people who have just given up, it can't be fudged by counting part time employment. And you can combine that with the wage distribution curve, and then the wealth distribution curve to get a pretty good picture of the overall economic health of your population.
I've never heard of a government that wants that. Generally, economic reports are spun to make the government look more effective than it has been and to protect the wealthy against accusations of hoarding that might result in taxation. A really bad government might just give up on spin and, say, fire people who won't just tell whatever lie they want.
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Generally, economic reports are spun to make the government look more effective than it has been
If this is true then wouldn't the Biden admin have wanted the BLS to hide or change the CPI reports during those first couple years in the supply chain crunch when those numbers were just destroying their approval ratings?
I'd be interested to hear what that statistic is and it probably has some use but I also would imagine there isn't a conspiratorial thing but rather methodological issues or consistent collection issue (how is that data collected??) to why it is not used by the BLS who ideally should be wa
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>If this is true then wouldn't the Biden admin have wanted the BLS to hide or change the CPI reports during those first couple years in the supply chain crunch when those numbers were just destroying their approval ratings?
The difference is between 'spin' and 'outright lying'. Normal governments will show the stats you can examine until the cows come home without being able to say they're lying. They adjust the definition of who is employed or seeking employment, things like that. They can still loo
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they adjust the definition of who is employed or seeking employment,
Do they? Colloquial employment has been U3 my entire life and all the other measures have always been available to critique, no matter who is trying to spin it. Same with LFPR
https://www.bls.gov/charts/emp... [bls.gov]
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/se... [stlouisfed.org]
I mean get the idea that today, 2026, we can't trust these things as clearly but this is really anomalous situation where the President has tried to fuck with the scorekeepers and it's pretty bad since no President has ever tried to do that before. I especially just don
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Rule of thumb:
Treat every day during an election year as if it were April 1st.
The political party in charge is going to lie, fudge and obfuscate the numbers to paint a rosy picture for re-election purposes.
The political party who wants to be in charge is going to lie, fudge and obfuscate the numbers to paint the opposite picture for re-election purposes.
This is true of both parties and its practice goes back longer than most in here have even been alive.
( Once you've earned your " Get off my lawn " merit ba
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The " official " published numbers aren't an accurate means of diagnosis since the data is typically maniuplated to hell and back.
Before Trump II this has never been true. People can talk about the numbers however they want but the BLS and The Fed has always published the facts they collect and how they collect them.
Frankly the fact Trump is giving air to this idea is very dangerous but to think any previous admins directly fuck with the numbers has no evidence.
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U6 (currently at 7,7%) includes all of the following: "People marginally attached to the labor force are those who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months.
These statistics come from a survey of households, so it's functionally non-representative to begin with because the data only comes from the kind of people who bother to answer surveys from the government. But more importantly, the methodology is shit:
For one thi
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employed people are not unemployed...
When the only person complaining about my comment is a functionally illiterate coward I know I've hit the mark. Thanks.
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But couldn't this be fudged as well? How do you count "hours expected to be working"? You can't just say, "Everyone should be working 40 hours a week."
- Some businesses don't need full-time (40 hour/week) employees, just a part-time staff to cover the busy time. People still need to fill these roles but may not want to find second jobs to even out the hours not supplied by the first job.
- On the other hand, some will take 3 jobs to make ends meet which all combined would be more than a single full-time work
Re:This makes my suspicion nipple tingle (Score:5, Insightful)
Any additional jobs gained in construction of datacenters have to be temporary. Once you're done constructing the datacenter, your job is finished. Unless you assume that the AI bubble keeps growing indefinitely and new datacenters will continuously keep getting built, but even in that case at some point you'll run out of land.
I'm not saying it's a bubble (Score:1)
but, itsa bubble!
and the UFO crews know this.
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goes back to the us not having serious and transparent job market stats
In particular, the guy running the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produced the figures, is a recent Trump appointee who was in the Council of Economic Advisers in both Trump's first and second terms. So you can bet the stats they're publishing say exactly what Trump has told them to say.
Re:This makes my suspicion nipple tingle (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure anything from the Bureau of Labour Statistics can be trusted right now. Given how blatant Trump has been at telling the Federal Reserve what he wants them to do, do you think some little pimple on the ass of the government like the BLS has got away without being meddled with?
It'll take a few years, but it'll become apparent that the "official" statistics or version of events deviates from the ordinary person's experience pretty soon. Then the journey to the Dark Side (aka. banana republic) will be complete.
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"construction and infrastructure workers" have good prospects.
Good, but those are short term jobs. When the data center is completed they move on.
Second, those are not the comfortable office jobs the current crop of college graduates expect. There will be some cognitive disconnects when the kids figure this out although it's already starting.
The fashion industry may be collateral damage if everyone, especially the women, has to wear OSHA approved clothing to work. No swishy skirts, no high heels, no sanda
Disagree, another plant of a story pushing agenda (Score:2)
So, we are going to see "AI might not be so bad" news story plants for at least a year now, right?
Show hard statistics on the number of jobs created by AI, where, what country, what region of the country, job titles, pay rates above McDonalds + $3.
Otherwise, it is "lots of new jobs created" without any backing data.
We have the data already, there are US state level registries required to track each new person hired, pay rate, etc. all for the state government to get the Title IV money.
There is also Social S
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The people responsible for compiling the jobs data were recently fired for reporting numbers that the great leader disliked. Their replacements have consistently produced numbers showing growth in the job markets.
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These are The Economist's "estimates", also known as bullshit. You know, The Economist: the weekly magazine of classical economic liberalism where the journalists are anonymous, photography is of the stock variety, and the articles are business friendly. Also the leading advertiser for the fossil fuel industry.
Re: This makes my suspicion nipple tingle (Score:1)
Magic Wand of TEH ECONOMY1 (Score:4, Insightful)
The chief economist at the Burning Glass Institute agrees, estimating that roughly 1% of professional jobs are now "AI jobs"
Man, fuck you and your crack pipe. My job doesn't become a janitorial job because I pick up a piece of trash and it doesn't become an AI job because some AI feature was snuck into some software I was using. This is why you can't trust economists' statistics. You can't have a hard science without meaningful data.
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Re: Magic Wand of TEH ECONOMY1 (Score:2)
lies, damn lies, and statisticsâ¦
Where's the AI GAINS? (Score:5, Interesting)
Absolutely none of that has anything to do with AI - Except insofar as some fraction of those new "restaurant workers" are presumably displaced junior office and IT workers who have effectively given up on finding a real career and need to pay the bills today.
Re: Where's the AI GAINS? (Score:3)
Yeah, landscaping and fruit picking jobs are super desirable too. Next round of hiring is military jobs for the forever war in Iraq, and unscrupulious number crunchers who can make up reports that look like we're not running things straight into the ground.
Just kidding, those are both going to AI.
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Where did you hear this and post the evidence.
Of course you won't because you just read it on X from a guy named "WhiteSaviour1488" where you get all your news!
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The "2.9 million" number comes from the Center for Immigration Studies [cis.org] ("Low-immigration, Pro-immigrant"). They say the number comes from "the government’s monthly household survey, officially called the Current Population Survey (CPS)" and "shows an unprecedented 2.9 million decline in the foreign-born population -- naturalized citizens, lawful permanent residents, long-term temporary visitors, and illegal immigrants ...."
"Latin American non-citizens who arrived in 1980 or later account for all of
Quantity over quality (Score:2)
Percentages alone tell us f... all. We would need to know in which industries unemployment dropped and where it has risen. We'd need to know how many of those people with in jobs with a future, and how many in dead-end jobs.
What good would lower unemployment be if it turned out that skilled workers are displaced and forced into any low skilled job they can get hold on to purely survive?
We need quality over quantity and rising living standards.
Re: Quantity over quality (Score:3, Informative)
More BS Jobs. (Score:1)
Goes to show: Many (white collar bullshit) jobs are a social thing, not a productivity thing.
In ohter words: Using computer and AI is more and more a cultural technique rather than a job. Meaning we have more liberty when chosing what we want to do with our life and time.
Which, if you ask me, is actually a good thing. Let's hope this trend continues on a positive path.
Re: More BS Jobs. (Score:2)
The Burning Glass Institute? (Score:2)
Wait? What?
The apocalypse is coming you'll see! (Score:2)
But jokes aside I think the real coming jobs apocalypse is in the C-suite....because they can be replaced with dispassionate, delusional AI for a fraction of the cost.
AI that doesn't sleepy. Doesn't bitch about the bonus structure. Doesn't discriminate based on liking someone's face and doesn't try to sleaze their way into the hot office chick's skirt.
Maybe we should all start companies ruled by
They fired most of the agency... (Score:5, Informative)
...and since then, the jobs report has been notorious for having corrections weeks later that few notice. I won't even say grain of salt. There's little about this that will hold up.
Many jobs in hospitality were for the World Cup, and they were all temporary, part time, barely above minimum wage, and now done.
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Just like datacenter construction jobs.
No, those pay well because they want the work done quickly. On the other hand, the work disappears quickly.
AI cant take jobs at any meaningful scale (Score:2)
Only robots, and that too arguably (if mismanaged), can take jobs. Most jobs require physically doing something.
After firing the person in charge of these stats.. (Score:4, Informative)
What's old is new again (Score:2, Insightful)
Those of us who have lived longer than the last few years know that this kind of thing has happened many times. Every time some new technology gains traction, the luddites get all chicken-little. Try finding yourself a typist or a research librarian. Try finding someone who knows how to make a fax machine. Try finding a door-to-door salesman. So many tasks that used to be performed by humans no longer are. It happens over and over throughout history. The same is true of AI.
Back in the 1980s, if you w
Re: What's old is new again (Score:2, Troll)
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Those of us who have lived longer than the last few years know that this kind of thing has happened many times.
Survivorship bias detected. Irrelevant comment always follows.
AI Jobs ... (Score:2)
Like with every big change (Score:2)
Only that (Score:3)
You can admit to failing due to enshittification.. (Score:3)
The tech industry had a record expansion, but hit a brick wall due to rising interest rates...which lucky for those fraudsters, happened a year or 2 after OpenAI had their first release. I remember Marc Benioff being one of the very first frauds to AI-wash, claiming he didn't need those workers because their AI was soooo good....yet he has no demo and doesn't want to earn a FORTUNE selling this magic AI that can replace so many jobs at an advanced big tech company like Salesforce????
They have a long history of claiming to lay off people due to advances in AI, but in reality, all evidence points to there being none. They simply didn't want to advertise their overhiring in the past and the economic headwinds they're facing...especially with the Trump administration, which has taken vindictiveness to a level never seen before. If a major company lays of 5% of their workforce and blames economic headwinds, most of which were DIRECTLY CAUSED BY THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION'S TRADE WAR, then they risk getting on his radar...and no one wants that. Love Trump or hate him, if you're a CEO, it's very bad for business to be on his bad side. It's best to avoid confrontation and wait out until his term ends or all the cocaine and cheeseburgers finally catch up with him.
Life was a LOT better for the tech companies 4 years ago. Interest rates were super low. Globalization and free-trade hit their peak. The economy was in much better shape. Record number of people were falling in love all over again with their devices due to lockdown. The future was bright.
Today, the future is VERY uncertain. Admitting that makes you look weak...so they lie outright to investors....Oh...we didn't overhire...oh no, we're not being DESTROYED by the RAMpocalypse + Tariffs!!!!!....people aren't losing interest in our products due to our late-state enshittification. We're laying people off because we're so amazing at AI.
I use Claude daily. It's cool. It's fun to play with. I can do things with Claude I couldn't do before....but.....not a fucking thing I do with it is related to what I am paid for. For my actual job?...IT SUCKS ASS!!!! I've used it daily for 2 years, by employer mandate. I can say the code it generates compiles successfully more often. Now I get compilation failures weekly instead of daily. But the code it generates is wrong, daily....objectively wrong...meaning it understood my intent and made an objective error. I never count it when it fails due to me giving vague requirements. In the end, it takes Claude longer to do my job than it would have taken me to do it myself...literally....even if it got it right the first time!...it churns for 15 minutes doing a task I can do in like 30 seconds to a few minutes. Adding in the frequent error correction, it does my job much worse than I do. It's good at letting me do other people's jobs...but in there are caveats:
1. I am paid to do my job, not other people's jobs.
2. For other people's jobs, I don't know enough to know if it did the job correctly or not. For example, I don't know how to write a React UI....so having claude make me one...well, I can tell you if it loaded without error, but I beyond that, I don't know if it did an adequate job, good job, or shit job.
3. If you force me to learn how to write a UI in React, I'd get better with time and become a more valuable asset to my employer. By throwing it to an AI, well, I am not learning much.
So is AI helping my team? We don't know. I can't say no for sure, but I am pretty confident it's not helping much. My boss doesn't know either...nor does his boss. We know we want to be super proficient in leveraging AI. But our vel
And the next boom will be (Score:2)
People that can still do things without AI and people that can do things AI cannot do. Just that there are not so many of those around.
So Dario and Sam are full of it? (Score:2)
Anything they say should be met with a derisive John Candy meme: "Oh sure, sure. Whatever you say..."