Two years later, Acemoglu’s measured take has not caught on. Chatter about an AI jobs apocalypse pops up all over the place from Senator Bernie Sanders’s rallies to conversations I overhear in line on the grocery retailer. Some beforehand skeptical economists have gotten extra open to the concept one thing seismic could possibly be coming with AI. A California gubernatorial candidate said final week that he desires to tax company AI use and pay victims of “AI-driven layoffs.”
On the one hand, the info continues to be on Acemoglu’s aspect; research repeatedly discover that AI shouldn’t be affecting employment charges or layoffs. However the know-how has superior fairly a bit since his cautious predictions. I spoke with him to know if any of the most recent developments in AI have modified his thesis, and to search out out what does fear him as of late if not imminent AGI.
AI brokers
One of many greatest technical leaps in AI since Acemoglu’s paper has been agentic AI, or instruments that may transcend chatbots and function on their very own to finish the aim you give them. As a result of they will work independently reasonably than simply answering questions, corporations are more and more pitching brokers as a one-to-many substitute for human employees.
“I believe that’s only a shedding proposition,” Acemoglu says. He thinks brokers are higher considered instruments to enhance specific items of somebody’s work than one thing malleable sufficient to deal with an individual’s entire job.
One motive has to do with all the assorted duties that go right into a job, one thing Acemoglu has been researching in his work on AI since 2018. For instance, an x-ray technician juggles 30 totally different duties, from taking down affected person histories to organizing archives of mammogram photos. A employee can naturally swap between codecs, databases, and dealing kinds to do that, Acemoglu says, however what number of particular person instruments or protocols would an AI require to do the identical?
Whether or not or not brokers will supercharge AI’s affect on jobs will come all the way down to whether or not they can finally deal with the orchestration between duties that people do naturally. AI corporations are in heated competitors to show that their AI brokers can work independently for ever longer intervals with out making errors, generally exaggerating the outcomes—however Acemoglu says many roles will probably be spared from an AI takeover if brokers can’t fluidly swap between duties.
The brand new hiring spree
For years Huge Tech has been providing staggering salaries to recruit AI researchers. However I requested Acemoglu a couple of totally different hiring spree I’ve seen: AI corporations are all constructing in-house economics groups.
OpenAI employed Ronnie Chatterji from Duke College in 2024 to be its chief economist and announced final yr that Chatterji will work with Jason Furman—Harvard economist and former advisor to Barack Obama—to analysis AI and jobs. Anthropic has convened a bunch of 10 main economists to do related work. And simply final week, Google DeepMind introduced it had employed Alex Imas, an economist from the College of Chicago, to be its “director of AGI economics.”
