'In the Battle With Robots, Human Workers Are Winning'

Despite warnings that AI will rob humans of jobs, "Somehow we sacks of meat - though prone to exhaustion, distraction, injury and sometimes spectacular error - remain in high demand," writes New York Times columnist Farhad Majoo. AI has yet to replace humans in supposedly at-risk professions like truck driving and fast-food services. Majoo's conclusion? "Humans have been underestimated."It turns out that we (well, many of us) are really amazing at what we do, and for the foreseeable future we are likely to prove indispensable across a range of industries, especially column-writing. Computers, meanwhile, have been overestimated. Though machines can look indomitable in demonstrations, in the real world A.I. has turned out to be a poorer replacement for humans than its boosters have prophesied. What's more, the entire project of pitting A.I. against people is beginning to look pretty silly, because the likeliest outcome is what has pretty much always happened when humans acquire new technologies - the technology augments our capabilities rather than replaces us. Is "this time different," as many Cassandras took to warning over the past few years? It's looking like not. Decades from now I suspect we'll have seen that artificial intelligence and people are like peanut butter and jelly: better together. It was a recent paper by Michael Handel, a sociologist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that helped me clarify the picture. Handel has been studying the relationship between technology and jobs for decades, and he's been skeptical of the claim that technology is advancing faster than human workers can adapt to the changes. In the recent analysis, he examined long-term employment trends across more than two dozen job categories that technologists have warned were particularly vulnerable to automation. Among these were financial advisers, translators, lawyers, doctors, fast-food workers, retail workers, truck drivers, journalists and, poetically, computer programmers. His upshot: Humans are pretty handily winning the job market. Job categories that a few years ago were said to be doomed by A.I. are doing just fine. The data show "little support" for "the idea of a general acceleration of job loss or a structural break with trends pre-dating the A.I. revolution," Handel writes. Handel notes that despite AI's high performance in analyzing X-rays, the number of (human) radiologists keeps increasing, with worries that the supply of (human) radiologists may not keep up with demand. One Stanford radiologist recently argued that instead, "The right answer is: Radiologists who use A.I. will replace radiologists who don't."

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