Another piece of evidence that the AI is already having substantial labor market effects, Brynjolfsson et al.’s paper (released today!) shows that sectors that can be more easily automated by AI has seen less employment growth among young workers. For example, in Software engineering:
I think some of the effect here is mean reversion from overhiring in tech instead of AI-assisted coding. However, note that we see a similar divergence if we take out the information sector alltogether. In the graph below, we look at the employment growth among occupations broken up by how LLM-automateable they are. The light lines represent the change in headcount in low-exposure occupations (e.g., nurses) while the dark lines represent the change in headcount in high-exposure occupations (e.g., customer service representatives).
We see that for the youngest workers, there appears to be a movement of labor from more exposed sectors to less exposed sectors.
Another piece of evidence that the AI is already having substantial labor market effects, Brynjolfsson et al.’s paper (released today!) shows that sectors that can be more easily automated by AI has seen less employment growth among young workers. For example, in Software engineering:
I think some of the effect here is mean reversion from overhiring in tech instead of AI-assisted coding. However, note that we see a similar divergence if we take out the information sector alltogether. In the graph below, we look at the employment growth among occupations broken up by how LLM-automateable they are. The light lines represent the change in headcount in low-exposure occupations (e.g., nurses) while the dark lines represent the change in headcount in high-exposure occupations (e.g., customer service representatives).
We see that for the youngest workers, there appears to be a movement of labor from more exposed sectors to less exposed sectors.