'The Jobs Apocalypse Is Postponed. An AI Jobs Boom Is Here' (economist.com)
- Reference: 0185477704
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/09/06/214258/the-jobs-apocalypse-is-postponed-an-ai-jobs-boom-is-here
- Source link: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/09/04/the-jobs-apocalypse-is-postponed-an-ai-jobs-boom-is-here
> Perhaps AI will eventually make [2]many humans unemployable — but there is no sign of it yet. On September 4th the Bureau of Labour Statistics reported that the American economy added 162,000 jobs in August, far above expectations. The unemployment rate is just 4.1%, lower than in almost 90% of months over the past half-century. Young workers, often [3]cast as AI's first victims , are holding up remarkably well: the gap between unemployment among 20-24-year-olds and the overall rate is close to a multi-decade low.
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> Some companies and workers are being severely disrupted by AI. Hiring in professional and business services is running about 10% below the average in 2015-19. Tech giants like Microsoft and Meta are trimming headcounts as they reorganise their businesses around the technology. Smaller firms such as Block, the owner of Square and Cash App, and Intuit, the maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks, are replacing people with bots. American companies have announced some 16,000 AI-related job cuts a month on average so far this year, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an employment consultancy.
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> But AI-related lay-offs gets lost in the churning jobs market where employers shed roughly 1.7m workers in a typical month. And the evidence so far is that AI is already creating a lot of jobs to replace those it has destroyed. The vast sums pouring into data centres and power generation have set off a race for construction and infrastructure workers. AI startups are hiring like there is no tomorrow. Incumbents racing to keep up are creating new AI roles. And by making some workers more productive, AI may be increasing demand for their services.
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> Add it all up, and The Economist estimates that AI has so far created around 1m new jobs in America. That easily exceeds the roughly 200,000 lay-offs attributed to AI since mid-2023, and appears more than enough to offset weaker hiring in many back-office roles.
Their article acknowledges that since January 2023 employment has fallen roughly 10% for customer-service workers and 15% for administrative assistants. But when The Economist looked at professions "closest to the AI boom" — engineers, software developers, mathematicians and data scientists — they found that since 2022 they've added roughly 730,000 jobs above trend. They see AI as creating new white-collar jobs for everyone from model and deployment engineers to new data annotators.
The chief economist at the Burning Glass Institute agrees, estimating that roughly 1% of professional jobs are now "AI jobs" — about 1 million positions in the U.S. — while in computer occupations and life sciences it's between 4% and 5%. (Data-center construction spending also increased 60% in one year, according to Census Bureau data, creating jobs for electricians, HVAC specialists, grid engineers, and machine technicians.) And "Indeed finds that installation and maintenance jobs at data centres advertise wages about 40% higher than comparable work elsewhere."
[1] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/09/04/the-jobs-apocalypse-is-postponed-an-ai-jobs-boom-is-here
[2] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/05/14/prepare-for-an-ai-jobs-apocalypse
[3] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/05/13/is-ai-putting-graduates-out-of-work-already
Magic Wand of TEH ECONOMY1 (Score:4, Insightful)
> The chief economist at the Burning Glass Institute agrees, estimating that roughly 1% of professional jobs are now "AI jobs"
Man, fuck you and your crack pipe. My job doesn't become a janitorial job because I pick up a piece of trash and it doesn't become an AI job because some AI feature was snuck into some software I was using. This is why you can't trust economists' statistics. You can't have a hard science without meaningful data.
Re: (Score:2)
Any day now I expect you'll be redefined as an AI, because you exhibit above average intelligence .
Re: (Score:2)
That's just one of the ways it lies. Another is that a job building an AI data center is not a job, it's a gig. Also: "initial effects look positive" doesn't support the title, even if it were true, the job numbers are all jobs, not ai, it's one jobs report, not ai jobs, it's building on job statistics that carefully count people who have given up but would gladly return to the labor market if jobs were out there as not looking, ignores underemployment and undesirable gig work, layoffs "due to AI" are a lie
Re: Magic Wand of TEH ECONOMY1 (Score:2)
lies, damn lies, and statisticsâ¦
Where's the AI GAINS? (Score:4, Interesting)
The August jobs report included 59k for restaurant workers and 42k for local government education - 62% of the total was effectively high-volatility seasonal work, partially making up for the slow growth earlier in the summer.
Absolutely none of that has anything to do with AI - Except insofar as some fraction of those new "restaurant workers" are presumably displaced junior office and IT workers who have effectively given up on finding a real career and need to pay the bills today.
Re: Where's the AI GAINS? (Score:2)
Yeah, landscaping and fruit picking jobs are super desirable too. Next round of hiring is military jobs for the forever war in Iraq, and unscrupulious number crunchers who can make up reports that look like we're not running things straight into the ground.
Just kidding, those are both going to AI.
Re: (Score:2)
Where did you hear this and post the evidence.
Of course you won't because you just read it on X from a guy named "WhiteSaviour1488" where you get all your news!
Quantity over quality (Score:2)
Percentages alone tell us f... all. We would need to know in which industries unemployment dropped and where it has risen. We'd need to know how many of those people with in jobs with a future, and how many in dead-end jobs.
What good would lower unemployment be if it turned out that skilled workers are displaced and forced into any low skilled job they can get hold on to purely survive?
We need quality over quantity and rising living standards.
Re: Quantity over quality (Score:2)
You start by reading the BLS report. [1]https://www.bls.gov/news.relea... [bls.gov]
[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.toc.htm
More BS Jobs. (Score:2)
Goes to show: Many (white collar bullshit) jobs are a social thing, not a productivity thing.
In ohter words: Using computer and AI is more and more a cultural technique rather than a job. Meaning we have more liberty when chosing what we want to do with our life and time.
Which, if you ask me, is actually a good thing. Let's hope this trend continues on a positive path.
Re: More BS Jobs. (Score:2)
We don't have any liberty on what to do with your time. You either take a risk on self employment and try to make enough money whether there is AI or not, or work for a company that has found a way to skim profit of of you whether there is AI or not, or be poor and either use AI to make resumes...or not.
The Burning Glass Institute? (Score:2)
Wait? What?
The apocalypse is coming you'll see! (Score:2)
...but it will come after all the accountants lose their jobs because everyone will replace them with Excel.
But jokes aside I think the real coming jobs apocalypse is in the C-suite....because they can be replaced with dispassionate, delusional AI for a fraction of the cost.
AI that doesn't sleepy. Doesn't bitch about the bonus structure. Doesn't discriminate based on liking someone's face and doesn't try to sleaze their way into the hot office chick's skirt.
Maybe we should all start companies ruled by
They fired most of the agency... (Score:3)
...and since then, the jobs report has been notorious for having corrections weeks later that few notice. I won't even say grain of salt. There's little about this that will hold up.
Many jobs in hospitality were for the World Cup, and they were all temporary, part time, barely above minimum wage, and now done.
AI cant take jobs at any meaningful scale (Score:2)
Only robots, and that too arguably (if mismanaged), can take jobs. Most jobs require physically doing something.
After firing the person in charge of these stats.. (Score:2)
... trumpstien got stats he lies... except now that goes against lowering interest rates. Poor trumpstien.
What's old is new again (Score:1)
Those of us who have lived longer than the last few years know that this kind of thing has happened many times. Every time some new technology gains traction, the luddites get all chicken-little. Try finding yourself a typist or a research librarian. Try finding someone who knows how to make a fax machine. Try finding a door-to-door salesman. So many tasks that used to be performed by humans no longer are. It happens over and over throughout history. The same is true of AI.
Back in the 1980s, if you w
This makes my suspicion nipple tingle (Score:5, Insightful)
"But AI-related lay-offs gets lost in the churning jobs market where employers shed roughly 1.7m workers in a typical month. And the evidence so far is that AI is already creating a lot of jobs to replace those it has destroyed. The vast sums pouring into data centres and power generation have set off a race for construction and infrastructure workers. AI startups are hiring like there is no tomorrow. Incumbents racing to keep up are creating new AI roles. And by making some workers more productive, AI may be increasing demand for their services"
There are hard numbers on how many jobs were lost and where. Can we see hard numbers on how many jobs were created and where? If the losses are well defined, why aren't the gains well defined? I am suspicious as a) CEOs are blabbering about how great AI is left and right with no numbers, and b) the current administration is a bunch of lying cunts that would happily lie about job numbers to look good.
Re:This makes my suspicion nipple tingle (Score:5, Interesting)
goes back to the us not having serious and transparent job market stats, it's a jumble of different statistics and projections.
they do cite the datacenter boom, particularly construction. if that's going to hold as a long-term strategy and is going to keep producing stable value for the economy and in particular for the job market remains to be seen, i would be skeptical even if the bubble doesn't pop (anytime soon).
25% of U.S. workers are "functionally unemployed"? (Score:4, Interesting)
Hows this for more serious job market stats?
"Nearly 25% of U.S. workers are "functionally unemployed," economic analysis finds"
[1]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/f... [cbsnews.com]
"The U.S. job market is less robust than it looks, according to a new analysis.
The nation's unemployment rate fell to 4.1% in July, well within the range economists consider healthy. Yet that measure, which reflects the percentage of people 16 and older who don't have a job and who are looking for work, is an imprecise metric that fails to offer a full picture of the health of the job sector, according to Gene Ludwig, chairman of the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP).
The economic research firm's "True Rate of Unemployment" (TRU) seeks to capture the share of workers that the group defines as "functionally unemployed." This includes not only people who are unemployed and looking for a job, but also those who are involuntarily working part-time and who are earning poverty-level wages, or less than $26,000 annually before taxes.
Functional unemployment across the U.S. has climbed four straight months and stood at 24.9% as of July, although that's down from 25.2% in December, according to the Ludwig Institute. ..."
Shadowstats has some similar unemployment numbers:
[2]https://www.shadowstats.com/al... [shadowstats.com]
To me, these sorts of huge (but often ignored) unemployment numbers reflect the continued playing out of larger trends like I outlined in 2010:
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics"
[3]https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-... [pdfernhout.net]
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society. ..."
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/functional-unemployment-us-labor-market-analysis/
[2] https://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts
[3] https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
Re: (Score:2)
There's a stat - I forget the name for it - but it's basically "The percentage of hours worked out of all those who would normally be expected to be working".
If you're of working age, not prevented by disability, etc., you would be counted. It can't be fudged by not counting people who have just given up, it can't be fudged by counting part time employment. And you can combine that with the wage distribution curve, and then the wealth distribution curve to get a pretty good picture of the overall economi
Re: (Score:2)
> Generally, economic reports are spun to make the government look more effective than it has been
If this is true then wouldn't the Biden admin have wanted the BLS to hide or change the CPI reports during those first couple years in the supply chain crunch when those numbers were just destroying their approval ratings?
I'd be interested to hear what that statistic is and it probably has some use but I also would imagine there isn't a conspiratorial thing but rather methodological issues or consistent collection issue (how is that data collected??) to why it is not used by the BLS who ideally should be wa
Re: (Score:2)
Any additional jobs gained in construction of datacenters have to be temporary. Once you're done constructing the datacenter, your job is finished. Unless you assume that the AI bubble keeps growing indefinitely and new datacenters will continuously keep getting built, but even in that case at some point you'll run out of land.
I'm not saying it's a bubble (Score:1)
but, itsa bubble!
and the UFO crews know this.
Re: (Score:1)
I'm not sure anything from the Bureau of Labour Statistics can be trusted right now. Given how blatant Trump has been at telling the Federal Reserve what he wants them to do, do you think some little pimple on the ass of the government like the BLS has got away without being meddled with?
It'll take a few years, but it'll become apparent that the "official" statistics or version of events deviates from the ordinary person's experience pretty soon. Then the journey to the Dark Side (aka. banana republic) will