No, AI robots won’t take all our jobs

He should know better—as should many other serious academics, who have been warning for years that AI will mean the end of employment as we know it. In 2013 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne of Oxford University produced a research paper estimating that 47% of U.S. employment was at risk of being eliminated by new technologies.

Before we resign ourselves to obsolescence at the hands of our new robot overlords, we’d do well to recognize that humans have experienced technological disruptions before, and we adapted to meet them. AI won’t be any different.

In the first half of the 20th century, tens of thousands of men and boys across America worked as pinsetters in bowling alleys. In 1946 AMF introduced an automatic pin-setting machine, and by the mid-1950s those jobs were mostly gone. Similarly, there was a time when the elevators in hotels and office buildings across the country were staffed by human operators. In the 1920s and ’30s, elevator companies began installing “robot elevators" with automatic controls, and eventually elevator operators all but disappeared.

Data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey tell countless other similar stories—from the decline of agricultural field workers due to motorized tractors to the rise and fall of “motion picture projectionists," who operated projectors in movie theaters. Entire categories of jobs were wiped out, yet automation has never created a mass lumpenproletariat.

AI doomsayers frequently succumb to what economists call the “lump of labor" fallacy: the idea that there is a limited amount of work to be done, and if a job is eliminated, it’s gone for good. This fails to account for second-order effects, whereby the saving from increased productivity is recycled back into the economy in the form of higher wages, higher profits and reduced prices. This creates new demand that in turn creates new jobs. Some of these are entirely new occupations, such as “content creator assistant," but others are existing jobs that are in higher demand now that people have more money to spend—for example, personal trainers.

Suppose an insurance firm uses AI to handle many of the customer-service functions that humans used to perform. Assume the technology allows the firm to do the same amount of work with 50% less labor. Some workers would lose their jobs, but lower labor costs would decrease insurance premiums. Customers would then be able to spend less money on insurance and more on other things, such as vacations, restaurants or gym memberships.

In other words, the savings don’t get stuffed under a mattress; they get spent, thereby creating more jobs. This is why Mr. Amodei’s prediction of 20% technology-driven unemployment makes little sense. It’s also why most studies on the topic find no net negative effect on employment from technology-driven automation. Some have even found a positive relationship, with increases in productivity leading to more jobs.

Further, there is a great deal of work that only humans can do. Self-driving school buses will still need an adult to watch the kids. As for police, AI robots won’t be arresting criminals anytime soon. It's a similar story for fish and game wardens, fashion models, priests, stonemasons, plumbers and flight attendants. Most occupations involve working with other people, with things or with ideas that are too complex for AI to handle alone. People in the last category include legislators, CEOs, antitrust attorneys and so on.

The U.S. is experiencing chronically slow productivity and wage growth, a rising number of retirees relative to workers, and massive budget deficits. It desperately needs economic growth. According to Goldman Sachs Research economists, broad adoption of AI could boost the country’s productivity growth by 1.5 percentage points per year.

Let’s imagine that Mr. Amodei’s dire forecast turns out to be accurate. Entry-level white-collar jobs constitute less than 15% of the U.S. labor force. Wiping out half of them in five years would mean roughly 2.6 million jobs lost per year. That sounds like a lot until you consider that according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 20 million U.S. workers are fired or laid off every year. In other words, the supposed AI job apocalypse, if it occurred, would be the equivalent of only about six weeks of normal labor-market churn.

On the other hand, if AI industry leaders keep scaring the pants off people, then politicians and the public might demand that they slam the breaks on further innovation. AI-driven productivity growth would slow down, and the average American family would pay the price.

Mr. Atkinson is president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.