The conventional fear about artificial intelligence and jobs runs something like this: the robots are coming for everything, and only the most creative, deeply human work will survive. A new paper by one of the world’s leading economists of automation turns that assumption on its head—and in doing so, arrives at a conclusion that is simultaneously more reassuring and more unsettling than the standard nightmare scenario.
Pascual Restrepo, an associate professor of economics at Yale University and one of the field’s foremost researchers on automation and labor markets, argues in a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research that most human work won’t be automated in an era of artificial general intelligence. The reason isn’t that AI lacks the capability. It’s that most of what people do for a living simply isn’t important enough to bother replacing.
