If artificial intelligence disrupts the job market, which workers will be most vulnerable?<\/p>\n
The obvious answer, and the one that has dominated public debate over A.I. job loss in recent months, is that the workers most at risk are programmers, software engineers and other tech industry employees. They have borne the brunt of the mass layoffs<\/a> by Meta, Block and other Silicon Valley companies. Their skills are the ones that A.I. systems have mastered first.<\/p>\n But many economists are more concerned about a different, larger group of white-collar workers: customer service representatives, bookkeepers, payroll clerks and human resources specialists who fly under the radar but collectively account for tens of millions of jobs.<\/p>\n Some of these workers have college degrees. Many do not. They are spread across the country and throughout the economy, working in every industry, in big cities and small towns, at major corporations and mom-and-pop businesses. They are disproportionately \u2014 overwhelmingly, in some occupations \u2014 women.<\/p>\n These jobs typically offer a middle-class salary or a pathway to achieving one \u2014 much as manufacturing jobs did for men before decades of globalization and automation wiped many of them away.<\/p>\n \u201cI worry that A.I. will be to high-school-educated women what deindustrialization was to high-school-educated men,\u201d said Molly Kinder, a former researcher at the Brookings Institution who is starting an organization focused on A.I.\u2019s impact on workers and the economy.<\/p>\n For now, such an outcome is a fear, not a forecast. Despite high-profile layoffs in tech and finance, there is little firm evidence that A.I. has hurt the labor market as a whole<\/a>.<\/p>\n Economists have become increasingly convinced<\/a> that disruptions are likely, but they say it is too early to know where or how widespread they will be. They remain broadly skeptical of claims that the technology will lead to mass unemployment in the near future. Some A.I. industry leaders have walked back such predictions in recent weeks.<\/p>\n But given the extraordinary pace at which companies are adopting A.I. \u2014 and at which the technology is improving \u2014 economists say policymakers need to consider the potential effects<\/a> on the labor market. And they say they are concerned that the public debate has focused too much on software engineers and a relative handful of other high-status careers \u2014 lawyers, consultants, economists \u2014 rather than the workers who could be most vulnerable.<\/p>\n Back-office jobs deserve more attention in the A.I. discussion, said Mark Muro, an economist at Brookings who has studied the impact of the technology.<\/p>\n \u201cThese are the kind of anchor jobs for families and households,\u201d he said. \u201cWe really need to keep our eye on what is occurring across the entire labor market and in all of these occupations.\u201d<\/p>\n Good Jobs at Risk<\/p>\n Software engineers have dominated the public discussion of A.I. partly because they have been the first to adopt it in their work. Measures of A.I. exposure that are based on how people are using the technology, therefore, inevitably show programming jobs as among the most at risk.<\/p>\n But as the technology spreads through the economy, a broader set of roles could be affected. For companies, the promise of A.I. is that it will save them money, and back-office jobs are an obvious place to look to cut costs.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you think about the back office, that\u2019s not the main function of the company, so they might think of it as a cost center,\u201d said Jung Ho Choi, an accounting professor at Stanford.<\/p>\n Economists at Northwestern University recently recalculated measures<\/a> of A.I. exposure based on the makeup of the total work force, not just the people using the technology. Administrative and frontline roles, such as customer service representatives, rose to the top of the list.<\/p>\n \u201cThe most affected jobs are secretaries, are routine clerks,\u201d said Michelle Yin, one of the working paper\u2019s authors. \u201cThey\u2019re not computer scientists or data scientists at all.\u201d<\/p>\n Widely cited measures of A.I. exposure, she added, \u201cgive the wrong impression\u201d about who will be most affected \u2014 and, in particular, tend to understate the impact on people without college degrees, older workers and people of color.<\/p>\n Ms. Kinder gave the example of medical records specialists, a job that pays about $50,000 a year and typically doesn\u2019t require a college degree. More than 90 percent of the jobs are held by women, many of whom work from home, making it an ideal role for many mothers with young children.<\/p>\n Other examples include billing and payroll clerks, and customer service representatives \u2014 jobs that pay at or near middle-class salaries without requiring a college degree. All of them are dominated by women. And all of them are, by various measures, vulnerable to substitution with A.I.<\/p>\n \u201cMy worry is that the lesson from deindustrialization is that many of these women will be able to get another job, but it might be a much worse job,\u201d Ms. Kinder said. \u201cIt might be more precarious.\u201d<\/p>\n Vanishing Options<\/p>\n Such workers are also more vulnerable in another way: They will have a harder time recovering if they do lose their jobs.<\/p>\n In a recent paper<\/a>, researchers at GovAI, a nonprofit focused on A.I. policy, sorted occupations into categories based on not only how exposed they were to A.I. displacement but also their ability to adapt to a job loss, using factors like age, education and income.<\/p>\n