It’s easy to fear that the machines are taking over: Companies such as IBM and the British telecommunications company BT have cited artificial intelligence as a reason for reducing head count, and new tools such as ChatGPT and DALL-E make it possible for anyone to understand the extraordinary abilities of artificial intelligence for themselves. One recent study from researchers at OpenAI (the startup behind ChatGPT) and the University of Pennsylvania concluded that for about 80% of jobs, at least 10% of tasks could be automated using the technology behind such tools.

“Everybody I talk to, supersmart people, doctors, lawyers, CEOs, other economists, your brain just first goes to, ‘Oh, how can generative AI replace this thing that humans are doing?’ ” said Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI.

But that’s not the only option, he said. “The other thing that I wish people would do more of is think about what new things could be done now that was never done before. Obviously that’s a much harder question.” It is also, he added, “where most of the value is.”

How technology makers design, business leaders use and policymakers regulate AI tools will determine how generative AI ultimately affects jobs, Brynjolfsson and other economists say. And not all the choices are necessarily bleak for workers.

AI Can Complement Human Labor Rather Than Replace It
Plenty of companies use AI to automate call centers, for instance. But a Fortune 500 company that provides business software has instead used a tool like ChatGPT to give its workers live suggestions for how to respond to customers. Brynjolfsson and his co-authors of a study compared the call center employees who used the tool to those who didn’t. They found that the tool boosted productivity by 14% on average, with most of the gains made by low-skilled workers. Customer sentiment was also higher and employee turnover lower in the group that used the tool.

David Autor, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that AI could potentially be used to deliver “expertise on tap” in jobs such as health care delivery, software development, law and skilled repair. “That offers an opportunity to enable more workers to do valuable work that relies on some of that expertise,” he said. Workers Can Focus on Different Tasks
As ATMs automated the tasks of dispensing cash and taking deposits, the number of bank tellers increased, according to an analysis by James Bessen, a researcher at the Boston University School of Law. This was partly because while bank branches required fewer workers, they became cheaper to open – and banks opened more of them. But banks also changed the job description. After ATMs, tellers focused less on counting cash and more on building relationships with customers, to whom they sold products such as credit cards. Few jobs can be completely automated by generative AI. But using an AI tool for some tasks may free up workers to expand their work on tasks that can’t be automated.

New Technology Can Lead to New Jobs
Farming employed nearly 42% of the workforce in 1900, but because of automation and advances in technology, it accounted for just 2% by 2000. The huge reduction in farming jobs didn’t result in widespread unemployment. Instead, technology created a lot of new jobs. A farmer in the early 20th century would not have imagined computer coding, genetic engineering or trucking. In an analysis that used census data, Autor and his co-authors found that 60% of current occupational specialties did not exist 80 years ago.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that workers will be qualified for new jobs, or that they’ll be good jobs. And none of this just happens, said Daron Acemoglu, an economics professor at MIT and a co-author of “Power and Progress: Our 1,000-Year Struggle Over Technology & Prosperity.”

“If we make the right choices, then we do create new types of jobs, which is crucial for wage growth and also for truly reaping the productivity benefits,” Acemoglu said. “But if we do not make the right choices, much less of this can happen.”