From Stanford Graduate School of Business
Our Misplaced Fear of Job-Stealing Robots
By Bill Snyder
Some good news: The robots aren’t coming for your job. Experts say fears that rapid advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation will leave all of us unemployed are vastly overstated...
That’s not to say that artificial intelligence isn’t having a profound effect on many areas of the economy. It is, of course. But understanding the link between the two trends is difficult and it’s easy to make misleading assumptions about the kinds of jobs that are in danger of becoming obsolete. “Most jobs are more complex than [many people] realize,” said Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, during a forum on the future of work, which was sponsored by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence...
When predicting future labor market outcomes, it is important to consider both sides of the supply and demand equation, says Varian, founding dean of the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. Most popular discussion around technology focuses on factors that decrease demand for labor by replacing workers with machines. However, demographic trends that point to a substantial decrease in the supply of labor are potentially larger in magnitude...
Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, is a professor emeritus and founding dean at the School of Information.
