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4 reasons why AI (probably) won’t take your job

What the AI jobs panic is missing.

AI is coming for the laptop class. While you clack away at your keyboard — writing code or drafting memos or making spreadsheets or scrolling X or perusing DoorDash or reading Vox or dreading death — machines are teaching themselves how to do your job.

Over the past four years, chatbots have gone from neat parlor tricks to hyperproductive polymaths. AI models can now generate new software out of a single English sentence, summarize case law in seconds, read CT scans with superhuman accuracy, and coordinate complex office workflows with scant human oversight.

Large language models (LLMs) — today’s premier form of artificial intelligence — still have their limitations. They can’t reliably fulfill most white-collar workers’ every function. But AI progress is compounding on itself. As LLMs automate the process of building better LLMs, they will kick off a feedback loop of exponential self-improvement.

Despite AI’s rapid advances, it still hasn’t substantially increased unemployment.

You don’t necessarily have to outperform AI at your job in order to keep it.

The go-to evidence for exponential AI progress has serious methodological flaws.

Thus, by the end of next year — if not this one — AI will render much of America’s professional class obsolete and push unemployment to 20 percent. Within a decade, the technology could wipe out virtually all forms of knowledge work.

Or so many of AI’s champions and detractors believe.

In recent weeks, the drumbeat of catastrophic labor-market forecasts has grown louder, with tech CEOs, financial analysts, and journalists penning viral predictions of an impending unemployment crisis.

In my view, the threat of AI-induced unemployment is worth taking seriously. And I’ve sketched out the case for alarm in past essays.

If the AI doomers’ concerns are warranted, however, their certainty is misplaced. Artificial intelligence could trigger mass white-collar layoffs in the near future. But there are plausible arguments against that scenario.

To inject some balance into the AI discourse — and/or, reassure myself that my hard-won verbal skills aren’t about to be less economically valuable than my flimsy biceps — I’ve sought out reasons for optimism about the white-collar labor market. Here are the four that I found most compelling:

1) You can see the AI age everywhere except in the jobs data

The first reason to doubt the doomer scenario for AI and unemployment is that it keeps not happening.

Or, more precisely: Despite the astounding capacities of today’s LLMs, there still aren’t many signs of large-scale, AI-induced job loss.

It takes time for firms to adopt new technologies, of course. But generative AI has been remarkably powerful for a while now. As of late 2024, it could already automate many coding tasks, generate research reports, write ad copy, review legal documents, and make terrible music at a near-human level.

Yet America’s unemployment rate has barely budged over the past two years, hovering near 4 percent.

Even in the industries most suited to AI-driven automation, employment shifts have been modest. Job postings for software developers have actually increased over the past year. Employment in market research, meanwhile, went up after ChatGPT hit the market. Even customer service representatives — arguably, the workers most threatened by chatbots — have not suffered massive job losses: Although employment in the field fell 10 percent from 2023 to 2024, it has held steady since then and remains close to its pre-pandemic level.

What’s more, there are few indications that mass, white-collar layoffs are on the horizon. In a December survey by the accounting firm KPMG, 92 percent of CEOs said they were planning to grow their head counts, even as 69 percent were dedicating a large share of their budgets to AI deployment.

Similarly, a January survey from EY-Parthenon found that 69 percent of CEOs expected that AI would lead them to either maintain or expand their payrolls.

One could dismiss this as sunny bluster. But there is evidence that these executives’ ostensible intuition — that AI adoption and downsizing don’t necessarily go together — holds true in practice. In a study of 12,000 European businesses published in February, firms that adopted AI saw a 4 percent increase in labor productivity — yet did not reduce their staffing in response.

Granted, if you scour the jobs data for portents of an AI-driven unemployment crisis, you can come up with a few. For one,........

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