The AI Jobs Apocalypse Is Not in the Data: CHART OF THE DAY
A labor market in rough balance is a strange place to look for an AI-driven jobs collapse. The full-time typist has disappeared, but very few jobs are like that—fully automatable by “AI”…
A labor market in rough balance is a strange place to look for an AI-driven jobs collapse. The full-time typist has disappeared, but very few jobs are like that—fully automatable by “AI”…
From Apollo, we have the monthly vacancies/unemployed ratio for the past 11 and a half years:
And:
Torsten Slok: Where Is the AI Jobs Crisis? <m/wealth/the-daily-spark/where-is-the-ai-jobs-crisis>: ‘If AI were triggering a jobs crisis, we would expect job openings to collapse and unemployment to climb, yet the opposite is happening. The number of job openings per unemployed worker has started to rise again and is now back above 1.0, meaning there are still more jobs available than workers to fill them, see chart below. The May jobs report reinforced this with nonfarm payrolls jumping by 172,000, confirming that there are no signs of workers being replaced by ChatGPT…
The labor market remains in the rough balance it has been in since mid-2024.
Back when my father was twenty some years younger than I am now and was working for the Ford Foundation, he would dictate and somebody—female—a typist—would type up his memos. The typist. At the keyboard eight hours a day with input coming through the earphones via dictaphone tapes or through the eyeballs via marked-up previous drafts or (shudder) handwritten scribbles. Those jobs are gone. But very few jobs are like the full-time typist’s job. Most jobs remain, albeit with a different configuration of tasks and automation, as waves of technological change wash over them.
So far, so good: We are not horse, and we have not peaked.
"The full-time typist has disappeared" - never seen any statistic to demonstrate that this "automation" actually brought any cost benefits.
In ancient history, I was teamed with a secretary/typist who did my typing, managed my email triage and my diary. She and I both worked a 7-hour day and usually finished all the work. I earned around 3x her wages. So, everything got done for 4x "unit wage".
In less ancient history - I designed complex systems, documented them and wrote long technical documents and reports. I did my own typing. I never finished all the work, or achieved the 180wpm single pass typing efficiency of my secretary.
Instead, I constantly rescheduled my workload to make time for typing, correction, formatting, triage and diary and my work throughput dropped by around 50%. Fortunately, so did that of all my peers and colleagues, for the same reason, and the reduced efficiency went unnoticed while everything cost 6x "unit wage" x1.50% (rescheduling allowance).
The customer bore the cost increase, the business services bore the efficiency drop and lots of expensive workers spent lots of expensive time maintaining their skills at using word processors and the IT department budget rocketed. Someone managed to persuade the CFO that this was cost effective. Perhaps he just liked playing with word processors.
The automation bit should perhaps have stopped at teaching the typists to use word processors, because that's where the efficiency gains stopped.
AI strikes me as being much the same. Lots of expensive specialist will waste lots of time learning to construct AI prompts that work and to use the automated prompters that will follow and someone will persuade the CFO that it was a smart move to fire the graduates who were really good at AI prompting and tool use at 1/4 the cost.
Damn I miss the secretaries!!!
They answered the phone and took messages and typed my reports and papers and made all my travel arrangements. Now will ai do what they did back in the before times before we all became sysadmins to our computers? Hard to see them as much fun as flesh and blood women. I miss flirting with them as they were young or not young and beautiful. I miss knowing about their lives, husbands and children. I miss sending them Christmas cards. Congratulating them on the birth or graduation of a child or in some cases a grandchild.
I view missing them as another example of the enshittification of the job environment.
We are herd animals so I don't see ai assistants being part of the herd.