"An AI Job Apocalypse?" – Goldman Sachs Report [pdf]

https://www.goldmansachs.com/static-libs/pdf-redirect/prod/index.html?path=/pdfs/insights/goldman-sachs-research/an-ai-job-apocalypse/report.pdf&originalQuery=&referrer=

by aanet • 20 days ago

31 79 20 days ago

goldmansachs.com

aanet• 20 days ago

Rapid improvements in AI capabilities and growing corporate adoption have led to predictions that the technology could lead to large-scale job losses before the end of the decade. So, just how concerned should we be about an AI “job apocalypse”? MIT’s Daron Acemoglu and Neil Thompson and GS’ Joseph Briggs generally agree that these predictions likely won’t come to pass, though they differ on the scale of disruption ahead. Briggs expects significant labor displacement but only temporarily as new jobs eventually emerge. Thompson is less convinced about large-scale job displacement and takes comfort in the ability to anticipate changes, seeing AI as a rising tide rather than a crashing wave for labor. And Acemoglu expects a small net negative impact on labor over the next five years, with possible larger losses over the longer term if investment remains focused on replacing rather than complementing workers. Amid this debate, we find that AI’s impact on corporate labor needs—and earnings—remains too uncertain for markets to reward (for now).

A GS report - including discussions with MIT labor economists DAren Acemoglu (Nobel), Neil Thompson

Quarrel• 20 days ago

FWIW I think Acemoglu writes very well & I loved his book "Why Nations Fail" for introducing lots of interesting ideas to me, while also helping me understand my own (non-failed) society better.

sublinear6• 20 days ago

What I got from that is, if someone is really so desperate to wipe egg off their face, they'll rename some existing job titles and use that to justify stagnant wages.

After all, you're not a "software engineer" anymore, but an "intelligence engineer"! You can do more with less! Meanwhile, the work is identical and hours are tracked more vigilantly.

Mistletoe• 20 days ago

I tried to find a GS report from the top of the 2000 tech bubble but couldn't find one. I wonder what it would have said?

TheOtherHobbes• 20 days ago

There's this, which seems uncontroversial.

https://people.duke.edu/~charvey/Teaching/BA453_2004/Street_...

bayarearefugee3• 20 days ago

Key to this view is our expectation that over the long run AI will create many new jobs even as it destroys existing ones.

Still waiting for anyone with this viewpoint to offer a single educated guess at what any of these created jobs might look like even in very broad terms.

All I ever see is basically a religious belief that surely something will arise.

I get that previous automation waves have lead to new jobs in the past, but automating knowledge and intelligence is just fundamentally a different thing than anything we have automated in the past and what exactly stops AI from taking those new jobs too as soon as the need for them is recognized?

morkalork• 20 days ago

I'm still waiting for this theory to demonstrate itself in countries that already have labour surplesses

otterdude2• 20 days ago

All I ever see is basically a religious belief that surely something will arise.

Welcome to economics! Bullshit and conjecture all the way down.

saimiam6• 20 days ago

If it were all BS, how do you explain success stories like the Internet and the notion that countries on Dell’s supply chain won’t go to war with each other?

Fundamentally, economics is the belief that humans have self-interests and act on them.

Economics is obviously not 100% right - it’s not a physical science - but more often than not, you can see it in action.

Economics is closer to weather science - we can make certain inferences and predictions which can be wrong but the basic working theory is broadly correct, imho.

Waterluvian• 20 days ago

I think a lot of jobs that have historically been automated were considered “intelligent” jobs.

I’m not sure if this really is different or not. I also think there’s an enormous amount of white collar work that isn’t actually “intelligent” work. Especially in software development.

The question I’ve been pondering isn’t about “where’s the intelligent work?” It’s, “what do we do when we’ve successfully vanquished work itself?” Will we move towards utopia? Or will the power disparity only grow and broken capitalism be used against us?

sublinear6• 20 days ago

I also think there’s an enormous amount of white collar work that isn’t actually “intelligent” work. Especially in software development.

That is begging the question pretty hard.

majormajor5• 20 days ago

I’m not sure if this really is different or not. I also think there’s an enormous amount of white collar work that isn’t actually “intelligent” work. Especially in software development.

There's a lot more outside of software development.

It's mystifying to me why software - where bugs or weird behaviors are often obvious to users - is considered easier to replace with these tools than, say, product management (is this accurate research about what features would drive what revenue? who knows even today! is this summary of customer feedback accurate? nobody's gonna know if it's not!), marketing, middle management, or any number of line-of-business "inspect stuff and pass it along to the next person on the chain" roles.

So much of those roles are basically "how can we turn people into process-following machines for consistency and predictability" and intentionally de-valuing intentional reasoning. Adding natural language processing of the inputs/outputs + deterministic rule systems on what to do is basically the entirety of replacing them.

“what do we do when we’ve successfully vanquished work itself?”

How does automating white-collar paper-pushing get us over the hump here? I think that would require a combination of human-level reasoning + extremely good robotics and automation, at the self-servicing level.

Which could be coming.

But until it happens, I think the real question around the "future of work" are more around what the future of exchange is. It doesn't necessarily have to look like 40 hour work weeks, which is a pattern that arose from pushback against industrialists trying to get ever-more hours out of people to watch the automation machinery and run the factories etc.

I think the interesting, non-apocalypse options fall into two categories:

1) what if you don't need white-collar knowledge factories anymore but smaller groups of individuals can establish markets between themselves with much-more-personalized services and solutions. Can you reverse the traditional economies of scale? Running SaaS as a megacorp requires a certain amount of hard-to-iterate-in-a-try-until-the-tests-pass decisions and expertise since you're trying to be everything to everyone 24x7. If you can provide a more customized version of the same service to a smaller group of people with much less operational overhead for even just 1/10000'th of a giant SaaS vendor's current revenue, you might have something (1/10000 of Salesforce's 40B revenue, for instance, is quite non-trivial).

2) what will people want when everything they spend heavily on today is commoditized? This is the historical path, and why we've never vanquished work in the past. Either ways to get an edge over a competitor by doing more for less, instead of the same for less; or improvements in essential goods and services (you don't need million dollar cancer treatments before they exist, but once they do you don't want to opt out); or in new novelties, keeping up with the Joneses. Showing off. Etc.

senordevnyc2• 20 days ago

This is such a disingenuous comment. The entire rest of the section where you lifted this quote from directly addresses the thing you’re claiming no one will ever even try to address. And they even close the section by acknowledging that “this time it’s different” might actually be true with AI, and that we simply don’t have enough data to say for sure!

bayarearefugee3• 20 days ago

The entire rest of the section where you lifted this quote from directly addresses the thing you’re claiming no one will ever even try to address.

Please point me to what I asked for, an example of what this magical new job actually looks like. What does a person with that job do on a day to day basis, in very broad terms. I didn't spot anything like this in the paper.

And they even close the section by acknowledging that “this time it’s different” might actually be true with AI, and that we simply don’t have enough data to say for sure!

The paper is basically a round-up of three different viewpoints. One of them (Acemoglu) I'm much more in agreement with than the others, and its his contributions you are referencing above.

The quote I pulled came from Briggs. He's the one I want more information from on what these jobs will look like and in what ways these new jobs are safe from AI displacement when the lost jobs they replace are not.

a34729t2• 20 days ago

I wish they would explore alternate hypotheses.

stale2002• 20 days ago

The people saying that jobs will all go away because of technology have been wrong every single year, up to this year as well.

The burden of proof seems like it's actually on you to show why this current tech boom is any different from previous ones.

As to the answer to your question, well just look at what people are doing at their jobs today. Those are what replaced jobs from 2 years ago.

ryeights• 20 days ago

OP already answered why this time is different. Previous technology has never reduced the scarcity of general intelligence, which has been the exclusive domain of humans.

ks20482• 20 days ago

The burden of proof seems like it's actually on you to show why this current tech boom is any different from previous ones.

In past tech advances, there was always a long list of things that could not be automated by a machine.

For some visions of "AI", almost by definition there is nothing left in that list.

(Except some things, of course, where people want to interact with a human).

Gregaros• 20 days ago

Onlyfans. Arguably, already began long before AI.

swalsh• 20 days ago

Okay, work with me on this, because its a stretch.

The new businesses created, might look very much like the old businesses that disappeared. But they're not focused on scale and profits. They're focused on an ideal of pushing the boundaries. Maybe a single craftsman making small one off hand made pieces. Maybe a pizzeria that puts out a small quantity of the best pizza. Little individual pursuits towards perfection. Enabled because economics is not important. If physical AI and super intelligence can do "everything" (work with me here) you're free to do small scale things you love. You're also free to raise children at home, work on mega projects, explore the world.

The alternative is a small subset of an elite inherit the world's wealth, create a prison society of surveillance robots that keep the permanent underclass at bay with video games, tiktoks, and pills.

bayarearefugee3• 20 days ago

If physical AI and super intelligence can do "everything" (work with me here) you're free to do small scale things you love. You're also free to raise children at home, work on mega projects, explore the world.

Sounds fantastic(al).

The alternative is a small subset of an elite inherit the world's wealth, create a prison society of surveillance robots that keep the permanent underclass at bay with video games, tiktoks, and pills.

I have to be honest with you, I'm not sure how anyone could be paying any attention at all to our current socioeconomic reality* and believe that the first alternative is likely to be the way this all goes (unless the issue is eventually forced through a massive, generational, bloody revolt).

(* I am admittedly being US-biased here, some other countries may fare much better)

majormajor5• 20 days ago

Take all the countries in the world and split them by "the ruling class enables people to do whatever small things they want" vs "the ruling class puts its own interest above everyone else's and uses technology for their own advantage and to strengthen their control."

Which count of countries comes out higher?

noncoml5• 20 days ago

Right. The uber rich are sure to share the wealth. Thanks for the laugh.

Americans are fucked. European on the other hand may start bring out the guillotines again.

onoesworkacct• 20 days ago

By "the alternative" are you describing our present reality? Because it sounds about right

saimiam6• 20 days ago

1. AI weights managers - people whose job is to optimize model weights to yield highly specific outcomes

2. Agentic tourism - maybe you’ll be able to send your AI agent/robot to visit a place before you decide if it worth your time and investment

3. Vehicular trains on highways where vehicles going to similar destinations coordinate and move as a unit. There’ll be people optimising roads for this. E.g., exit lanes on highways are designed for a handful of cars to exit safely at a time. What if vehicular trains can be thousands of vehicles long like those going to Burning Man?

4. Hallucination historians - people whose job is to document how AI errors have led to changes in the course of history

5. Animal linguistics - people whose can finally study the correlations between how human and animal languages deliver the same information

6. People designing puzzles and challenges to keep AI engaged during routine maintenance

7. S3x workers who specialise in servicing AI bots

8. Cryptographers whose job if to encode content using non mathematical methods because math base cryptography has become a solved problem

9. Interior designers who specialise in humanised decor because everything else is now handled by AI

10. Lawyers who fight cases on AI’s right to participate in the world as equals of biologics

ks20482• 20 days ago

I don't see why any of these can't be done by AI. Except (7), which frankly, I don't understand what you mean.

sublinear6• 20 days ago

3 and 5 have been active research for decades, 9 and 10 are obsolete sci-fi, 8 is probably impossible, and all the rest are fraud.

majormajor5• 20 days ago

Few of those seem like human jobs vs AI jobs in any scenario where AI is good enough to need to find massive amounts of new human jobs? Some of them explicitly aren't jobs, even in your description, like "send your AI agent/robot to visit a place."

(7) is basically "a mechanic/service technician" which is literally a job that already exists all over the place. Is is, at least, the only one that doesn't seem like one of these "agents" could do itself today, but in the world where the agents get that good, that level of robotic ability - the ability to manipulate a screwdriver with human dexterity - doesn't seem very far off at all and is being actively invested in by many many people.

relativeadv• 20 days ago

cute

doobiedowner• 20 days ago

Pid control was supposed to allow people that rotate valves to magically transform into software configurators. That never happened. Those people turned into janitors and an automated solution became a capital project. The janitorial staff gets fired in the end.

noncoml5• 20 days ago

This generation is f*cked, just like that generation was. The new jobs are for the next generation.

protocolture3• 20 days ago

Still waiting for anyone with this viewpoint to offer a single educated guess at what any of these created jobs might look like even in very broad terms.

Still waiting for mesopotamian farmers to imagine what all these workers will be doing after "the plough" automates farming.

All I ever see is basically a religious belief that surely something will arise.

I would rather see someone describe why Jevons doesnt apply to this one specific instance, without using big scifi imagery.

I get that previous automation waves have lead to new jobs in the past, but automating knowledge and intelligence is just fundamentally a different thing than anything we have automated in the past and what exactly stops AI from taking those new jobs too as soon as the need for them is recognized?

Its yet to even be demonstrated that AI is going to take many/any jobs. Its yet to be demonstrated that it can.

There was a great post here a few months ago showing how various technologies flagged as AI have a tendency to cap out at roughly 110% human capacity. And even for 110% there's no guarantee that this will be cheaper than hiring 1.1 humans instead of paying API fees. Theres also finance considerations, capex vs opex for deploying local models etc.

The last time I felt like this, I was trying to talk other crypto speculators out of buying every hyped up shitcoin. AI at the moment feels like it is running very much on hype about future potential that has little to do with reality. I hate to use the term bubble, however.

I was dealing with a support LLM just today, and all it did was give me nonsense to do before escalating. The human it escalated to immediately asked for the same nonsense. I just dont feel like reality has been as impacted by AI as people suggest.

marcus_holmes4• 20 days ago

The last time I felt like this, I was trying to talk other crypto speculators out of buying every hyped up shitcoin. AI at the moment feels like it is running very much on hype about future potential that has little to do with reality. I hate to use the term bubble, however.

Agree with this, but with nuance.

One of the differences with the AI tech is that we have a split between the technology and the businesses.

The current crop of large AI companies are totally in a bubble, and their economics make very little sense. That bubble is going to be extremely painful when it pops, and I hope we have the democratic fortitude to stop the losses being socialised through bailouts.

But the underlying tech is still good, and doing useful things. There are good open-source LLMs that are not that far behind the proprietary models, and can produce useful results.

Crypto had no use outside of the various currencies - there is not one successful use of blockchain tech that isn't a currency (or related), and the currency uses have been totally dominated by scammers and criminals. This is not the case with LLMs, which are useful tools, and will continue to be useful tools after the bubble bursts.

So yes, the hypers are hyping bullshit that is going to burst, and that is like the crypto situation. But after that bursts and they all go away (or hopefully broke), there will still be useful things being done with LLMs.

geoduck14• 20 days ago

I'm about to start a job where I expect AI to be a critical part. I will use AI to translate legal jargon to "simple English"

totetsu• 20 days ago

Maybe they don't want to draw attention to the fact that it's all gig-work.

hcbbh76• 20 days ago

Big one is keeping state or lets say world models in sync.

You give 2 systems 2 seemingly different problems. They start building/updating tools and theories and their internal world model starts diverging. As we already see with human specialists. Now imagine 2000 different systems reality diverging. Keeping them all in sync becomes more work than the actual prob they work on.

FloorEgg• 20 days ago

what exactly stops AI from taking those new jobs too as soon as the need for them is recognized?

Sample efficiency, energy efficiency and training data availability.

The current tech stack is around 6 orders of magnitude behind human capabilities. We have scaled up a paradigm that's been built out continuously for decades (transistors, matrix multiplication). To close the gap requires completely reinventing the entire stack (e.g. spintronics, physical graph traversal). The most advanced tech that is only theorized and not yet even proven is still 4 orders of magnitude less energy efficient than a human, and we have no idea how to get close to the same sample efficiency.

The question you are fretting won't matter for decades, and by then our culture, social and economic framework could be totally different than it is today.

Rather than worry about something so abstract and misunderstood, I would suggest focusing your time and attention on what is within your control here and now: who do you want to help, and how can you be of help, such that your efforts are sustainable and rewarding.

And if you really want to fret something at the edge of your control, fret about how AI is being used today to manipulate you and those you know into believing things that aren't in your best interest but are in someone else's best interest. If you aren't paying, you're the product. Most free media exists manipulate you, and if it has been designed to be addictive then it's virtually guaranteed.

ndm000• 20 days ago

I have been struggling with the same thing. Reading the other comments make me agree with you even more. The best I can come up with is two fold. First that humans will have jobs verifying the verifiers. That is, for important initiatives where something must be right, agents can be doing most if not all of the work, but it will still be a human’s job to investigate what was done and sign off on it. The second is that humans will still have to make agreements with other humans for resources, capital, and the like. Somethings will be scarce, others will become scarce. And humans will always own scarce things that other humans will need to use - and they won’t be making deals with machines.

Another frame I’ve heard is that people will only trust humans when it comes to their kids, health, and money. That’s the simpler view.

skinfaxi• 20 days ago

Another frame I’ve heard is that people will only trust humans when it comes to their kids, health, and money. That’s the simpler view.

I don't think even these are bastions. We trust machines to monitor our health (even in hospitals you are connected), our children (ever use a baby monitor), and our money through index funds. The path is incremental but we have started down it.

marcus_holmes4• 20 days ago

I'm seeing quite a few small businesses / solo ventures locally who are using AI productively in ways that they would not be able to afford humans doing the same job. So while this is replacing humans, it is not destroying jobs - those businesses would not be able to afford a human to do this job anyway.

It's a bit like Lean startup arising from Cloud computing - not having to provision your servers beforehand allowed a bunch of new small businesses (startups) to scale organically without needing vast amounts of capital locked up in hardware. Now AI is allowing a bunch of small businesses to operate with reduced expenses, enabling businesses that otherwise would not function, or would struggle.

A local IT/dev provider is seeing an increase in business serving this exact same market - small businesses vibe-coding an MVP then need help getting it stable and to the next level.

My guess is that this is the next Lean; small artisanal/local businesses that are enabled by the reduced costs from using AI in the business. And then the following wave of professional services that provide those functions at the next level as the artisanal businesses mature.

Just a guess, though, I think it's too early to be really confident about it.

arecsu• 20 days ago

In the camp of software development, if AI really increases productivity when it comes to development, thus making it cheaper in terms of human resources, there will be opportunities when it comes to offering custom development, software and services to sectors in society where it was pretty much an obscure idea due to costs. Small business who would otherwise rely on convoluted, inefficient workflows from non-specialized software given their needs, will be able to pay a developer who can provide them with custom tools and services. This is basically new opportunities for a huge number of people in the industry in both sides: developers and people who need them. Small analogy but this can be extrapolated to so many areas. You get the idea.

operatingthetan3• 20 days ago

Why are AI boosters turning around and trying to suggest AI now won't take our jobs? Or less jobs than previously stated?

Meanwhile Meta has so much AI compute that they don't know what to do with, and they are ready to lease it out. And corporations suddenly want token austerity across the board. OpenAI is delaying their IPO until "next year."

Something is starting to give.

a34729t2• 20 days ago

Because enough of the plebs are realizing the future is grim, so the PR firms have been put i to action. Earlier this year as if on cue Sam and Dario changed their tune on AI replacing workers.

operatingthetan3• 20 days ago

I think the general public is already kind of bored of AI and the phase of corporations writing blank checks for frontier models is over. The top labs keep doing shady marketing stuff (and various embarrassing stunts) and it's difficult to take their word at face value on anything.

Also Microsoft has been pouring money into AI and it's like not working at all. They might be in trouble.

w10-1• 20 days ago

Hey investors: companies will pay big to save salaries!

Hey people: not to worry, new jobs will come!

1 + 1 = 3 because growth!

pu_pe• 20 days ago

The AI replacement discourse was meant for the investors. Now that they have mostly secured the money, they want to convince the consumers.

harimau777• 20 days ago

The thing that I never hear discussed is how long it will take these "new jobs" to materialize and how much they will pay.

AnimalMuppet• 20 days ago

And what people do before the new jobs show up.

DrewADesign3• 20 days ago

Well in the Industrial Revolution, the no-longer-necessary skilled craftsman became miserable, poorly paid cogs in service of their new automatic controllers. So a lot of us have that to look forward to.

Personally, I’ve switched back to the track I was on in my twenties: I spent the day doing moderately interesting work in a skilled trade, periodically having to haul 80lb-90lb steel machine parts up two flights of stairs in an un-air-conditioned, 100 degree manufacturing facility wearing heavy protective clothes and tools. I’ve worked in blue collar jobs before so I’m used to it, but I’ve seen a lot of developers say they’re going to be electricians or something. Good fucking luck! I’d conservatively estimate that 90% of developers I worked with are too soft, either emotionally or physically, to complete the first week of a years-long trade apprenticeship. The starting salary is only marginally better than working at Walgreens, and you’re expected to do a shitload of grunt work that is usually done by 20-year-olds. I foresee the entry-level retail, DoorDash, uber, instacart, et al scenes getting a whole lot nerdier over the next few years.

carlosjobim• 20 days ago

They use AI to change their jobs into new kind of jobs already. Some old jobs will disappear, some new jobs will appear, and most old jobs will stay. But if you think your job is among those threatened, you should have started adapting already at least 1-2 years ago.

nondevmendel• 20 days ago

A few points:

1. As a somewhat self-denying but admittedly obvious "tech bro", I can't help but cringe at some of the tech bro podcasts claiming that AI is not going to mass replace jobs. After a previous round of layoffs at my company due to financial constraints. We've managed to not just replace the bulk of our developers withy Claude, but seriously outperform them and build some serious, real-world applications in very short order. These were applications that touch highly sensitive databases across multiple departments in our company. I cannot see where all these engineering jobs are going to go if our small company was able to replace our engineering team with one 4X smaller and get better output.

2. These same podcasters claim that "this is why people should be in trades and doing skilled labor, such as electricians and plumbers." We have to be fools to think that AI + robotics is not going to replace all this very shortly. For the longest time I said it would be about ten years, now, but seeing how my unbogglingly fast Claude got so good (i.e., just compared to last year), I find it hard to imagine that this would be less than three years out. I personally think that these "tech-elite" podcasters are trying to brand a message so that people won't be afraid of AI, but that none of them believe this message themselves.

3. For a tech-first forum/news site, I'm shocked by how anti-AI the sentiment seems to be here. I too am concerned for jobs, but that doesn't change how bullish and excited I am about what I am currently able to build and will be able to build going forward using AI. You may call that selfish, and I won't disagree, but I think it's also intrinsically tech-first, to have this viewpoint. I have no issue with somebody not being tech-first but complaining on Hacker News about a tech-first reality. It sounds disingenuous to me.

Stitch4223• 20 days ago

My role in IT was always to make myself obsolete. We’re in automation after all. AI doesn’t change that principle, it does remove some of the work I don’t like (when applied correctly).

newsomix9xl• 20 days ago

Ai equals job loss has always been a lie except for very special niche jobs e.g. illustrator.

AI can't even do ASCII diagrams. AI is our friend, but maybe CEOs who want superbonuses and obscene wages and pay themselves in stock so they have to play stock price games: not our friend.

red-iron-pine• 20 days ago

However, Acemoglu notes that if workers in higher-paid managerial roles are also displaced, as some think they could be, then inequality could actually decline.

"inequality could decline" is a hell of a way to say "everyone will be out of a job, even the managers"

"An AI Job Apocalypse?" – Goldman Sachs Report [pdf]

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