AI Is Really Really Taking Jobs Today
New Federal Reserve research is tracking something economists have long debated, and the early numbers point toward a labor market shift that could rival the worst economic downturns in modern American history.
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Will AI take jobs, or is the claim just a mirage? New data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas shows that AI as a human replacement has started and is accelerating. The jobs being taken match many forecasts of vulnerable sectors. The information also indicates the job destruction will spread.
In a new research paper titled “Job postings show early signs of AI automation impact,” the authors report, “A new analysis, using data from millions of online job postings, shows GenAI is reshaping labor demand in Texas.”
The research began measuring data in 2022, around the time ChatGPT was released. The researchers filtered out other downsizing reasons, as well as company departures or arrivals in the region. The data focused on automatable jobs that GenAI can replace.
The medical field was affected primarily because of technical jobs that involved evaluating and moving records. What was the ultimate measure across all industries? “The measure maps job tasks in the O*NET database—a comprehensive list of approximately 1,000 common occupations in the U.S. economy and the tasks they perform—to tasks performed using Anthropic’s Claude platform, a leading AI assistant and family of large language models.” (O*NET is a job management tool) Jobs that AI could do and that could be affected made up about 2.6% of the workforce. The data came partially from job postings.
Recent college graduates appear to be affected more than most other groups. Other research has shown that employment in entry-level white-collar jobs will be negatively affected. Goldman Sachs believes AI could cost 6% to 7% of Americans their jobs. Legal jobs, accounting jobs, and coders have often been on these lists.
As for retail jobs, the University of Delaware puts retail job losses at six million to seven and a half million.
Taken together, across all of these industries, job loss could certainly be 10 million people. The US labor workforce is 161 million people. Employment changes across these sectors would put 6% of Americans out of work. The unemployment rate today is just over 4%. Together, a 10% unemployment rate would match the worst level during the Great Recession. This means AI could cause an economic disaster not seen since the Great Depression.
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
