AI grabs starring role
It may be a while before our bot overlords render us extinct, a danger we’ve been warned of by many of the minds who brought us AI technology.
But artificial intelligence could cause plenty of chaos in the meantime. Witness the ongoing strike by actors and writers, who have stopped working in part because of the very real threat AI poses to their livelihoods.
Writers worry that AI will be used to write TV shows based on their past scripts, pirating their skills and sensibilities while putting them out of work. Actors are striking in part to prevent having their performances used without consent or compensation, as AI conjures digital clones of them based on their existing work — something that will never not be creepy.
Some of the more famous folks on the picket lines can afford to stay out of work for months, but for the actors and writers who barely scrape by, AI is already an immediate existential threat.
Maybe you don’t care about a bunch of Hollywood types, and you’re OK with what will probably be a drought of entertainment if the strike drags on for months. Maybe you’re no fan of the perfect shows that have suspended production, such as “Severance” and “Abbott Elementary.”
Fine. But AI will affect almost every kind of work. In March, Goldman Sachs economists said that current AI technology — like Chat GPT, which can answer prompts, converse like a human, and compose passable writing in any style — could affect some 300 million jobs worldwide, most of them more-easily automated white-collar administrative and legal jobs. Google is testing an AI tool that could write — gulp — news stories.
And this is no distant Armageddon; it’s happening right now. Employment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas estimated AI contributed to 3,900 job losses in May alone, almost 5 percent of the total jobs lost. We’re barely at the start here. You think that number won’t grow?
It’s hard not to panic. We’re looking at a massive realignment of the labor market, akin to the shifts that followed the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the internet.
But Jeffrey Liebman, an economist and professor of social policy at Harvard, isn’t there yet.
“Economies are highly resilient and able to come up with new activities to absorb workers,” said Liebman, who has studied the experiment with a guaranteed basic income in Chelsea, begun during the pandemic. “There will be disruption, and winners and losers, but the idea that in the next 20 years there are not going to be enough jobs for people is wrong. History shows that economies can achieve big reallocations of workers across sectors.”
Liebman points out that, despite dire predictions, the labor market survived the rise of computers last century. Jobs will be there once AI takes hold in this one, he said.
But what kind of jobs? Some economists worry that AI will displace workers into the lowerpaid reaches of the economy and widen inequality. It’s harder, too, for displaced workers to find jobs in an economy that isn’t growing rapidly, as it was during earlier disruptions.
Juliet Schor, an economist and professor of sociology at Boston College, is as worried as anyone when it comes to the effects of AI on humanity in general. But she said we can mitigate its worst labor impacts by rethinking how we do work, and pay for it, in this country. Think shorter work weeks, and a guaranteed basic income to put an economic floor under the poor.
“Unless working hour reductions accompany the technological change, there’s a much higher likelihood of generating unemployment,” she said.
Such safeguards are more likely to win grudging acceptance in the marketplace when workers are in a strong position, as they are now, because unemployment is low, public sentiment is with them, and employees are more willing to strike. That’s why, even if you’re not a TV person, the protests by actors and writers in Hollywood are relevant to your life and future: If they can hold off the devastating effects of AI, there might be hope for the rest of us.