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Paul Krugman

OPINION

Does ChatGPT Mean Robots Are

Coming For the Skilled Jobs?
Dec. 6, 2022

Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by AVAVA and Chris Collins, via Getty Images

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By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist

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Will robots take away our jobs?

People have been asking that question for an astonishingly long

time. The Regency-era British economist David Ricardo added to
the third edition of his classic “Principles of Political Economy,”
published in 1821, a chapter titled “On Machinery,” in which he
tried to show how the technologies of the early Industrial
Revolution could, at least initially, hurt workers. Kurt Vonnegut’s
1952 novel “Player Piano” envisaged a near-future America in
which automation has eliminated most employment.

At the level of the economy as a whole, the verdict is clear: So far,

machines haven’t done away with the need for workers. U.S.
workers are almost five times as productive as they were in the
early postwar years, but there has been no long-term upward trend
in unemployment:

Higher productivity hasn’t hurt overall employment. FRED

That said, technology can eliminate particular kinds of jobs. In 1948

half a million Americans were employed mining coal; the great
bulk of those jobs had disappeared by the early 21st century not
because we stopped mining coal — the big decline in coal
production, in favor first of natural gas and then of renewable
energy, started only around 15 years ago — but because strip
mining and mountaintop removal made it possible to extract an
increasing amount of coal with many fewer workers:

Some jobs have largely disappeared. FRED

It’s true that the jobs that disappear in the face of technological
progress have generally been replaced by other jobs. But that
doesn’t mean that the process has been painless. Individual
workers may not find it easy to change jobs, especially if the new
jobs are in different places. They may find their skills devalued; in
some cases, as with coal, technological change can uproot
communities and their way of life.

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This kind of dislocation has, as I said, been a feature of modern

societies for at least two centuries. But something new may be
happening now.

In the past, the jobs replaced by technology tended to involve

manual labor. Machines replaced muscles. On the one hand,
industrial robots replaced routine assembly-line work. On the other
hand, there has been ever-growing demand for knowledge
workers, a term coined by the management consultant Peter
Drucker in 1959 for people engaged in nonrepetitive problem
solving. Many people, myself included, have said that we’re
increasingly becoming a knowledge economy.

But what if machines can take over a large chunk of what we have
historically thought of as knowledge work?

Last week the research company OpenAI released — to enormous

buzz from tech circles — a program called ChatGPT, which can
carry out what look like natural-language conversations. You can
ask questions or make requests and get responses that are
startlingly clear and even seem well-informed. You can also do fun
things — one colleague recently asked for and received an analysis
of secular stagnation in sonnet form — but let’s stick with things
that might be economically useful.

ChatGPT is only the latest example of technology that seems to be

able to carry out tasks that not long ago seemed to require the
services not just of human beings but of humans with substantial
formal education.

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For example, machine translation from one language to another

used to be a joke; some readers may have heard the apocryphal
tale of the Russian-English translation program that took “the
spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak” and ended up with “the
vodka was good, but the meat was spoiled.” These days, translation
programs may not produce great literature, but they’re adequate
for many purposes. And the same is true in many fields.

You can argue that what we often call artificial intelligence isn’t
really intelligence. Indeed, it may be a long time before machines
can be truly creative or offer deep insight. But then, how much of
what human beings do is truly creative or deeply insightful?
(Indeed, how much of what gets published in academic journals —
a field of endeavor I know pretty well — meets those criteria?)

So quite a few knowledge jobs may be eminently replaceable.

What will this mean for the economy?

It is difficult to predict exactly how A.I. will impact the demand for
knowledge workers, as it will likely vary, depending on the
industry and specific job tasks. However, it is possible that in some
cases, A.I. and automation may be able to perform certain
knowledge-based tasks more efficiently than humans, potentially
reducing the need for some knowledge workers. This could include
tasks such as data analysis, research and report writing. However,
it is also worth noting that A.I. and automation may also create
new job opportunities for knowledge workers, particularly in fields
related to A.I. development and implementation.

OK, I didn’t write the paragraph you just read; ChatGPT did, in
response to the question “How will A.I. affect the demand for
knowledge workers?” The giveaway, to me at least, is that I still
refuse to use “impact” as a verb. And it didn’t explicitly lay out
exactly why we should, overall, expect no impact on aggregate
employment. But it was arguably better than what many humans,
including some people who imagine themselves smart, would have
written.

In the long run, productivity gains in knowledge industries, like

past gains in traditional industries, will make society richer and
improve our lives in general (unless Skynet kills us all). But in the
long run, we are all dead, and even before that, some of us may find
ourselves either unemployed or earning far less than we expected,
given our expensive educations.

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Quick Hits
Automation panic in 1960.

Ideas are getting harder to find.

Overall labor productivity hasn’t been rising very fast.

Self-driving cars are the technology of the future and always will
be.

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Facing the Music

Is this a brand-new Christmas classic?

Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a distinguished
professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel
Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic
geography. @PaulKrugman

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