AI refuses to take our jobs, but we're scared anywayAI keeps stubbornly refusing to take our jobs

In San Francisco, almost everyone in tech believes the main economic effect of AI is to displace humans from their jobs. The American public agrees: polls show most expect AI to compete with human workers.

Yet this "job killer" has stubbornly refused to kill jobs. The prime-age employment rate hovers near all-time highs, and it's hard to identify any positive shock other than AI itself to explain that.

Replacing tasks is not the same as replacing jobs

Economists Acemoglu and Restrepo point out that automation can not only displace labor, but also boost productivity and create entirely new tasks. Just as the power loom killed the weavers' craft but gave birth to jobs for technicians and engineers, AI is doing the same today.

Software engineers now write less code themselves and spend more time telling AI what to write, checking its output, and integrating it into products — all new tasks that didn't exist before.

The data says AI is creating jobs

A Census Bureau survey found that among firms reporting an effect from AI, more said it increased employment than decreased it. Company-level research by Kharazian et al. finds that when firms adopt more AI, they tend to hire more people, not fewer.

The Economist estimates AI has created about a million new jobs in America, far exceeding the roughly 200,000 layoffs attributed to it. The data-center boom has fueled demand for electricians and HVAC installers, while roles like AI engineer and head of AI barely existed a few years ago.

Fear is out of step with reality

A recent paper by Hartley et al. shows that the more people's jobs are exposed to AI, the more they fear replacement — yet actual job loss shows no correlation with that fear. The likely explanation: modern jobs are parts of a complex machine, and when AI takes over certain tasks, workers become more valuable as pieces of the machine.