A decade ago, two academics at the University of Oxford published a paper that would be cited for years to come. It was called “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?” and its headline answer to that question—47% of U.S. jobs—laid the foundation for the current trend of being rather scared of AI’s societal impacts.
Now, in the midst of a generative AI craze that few could have foreseen back in 2013, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne have revisited their seminal paper, asking themselves whether they had underestimated automation’s near-term effects on employment. I had a look at their working paper, which will be published in January, and was struck by the persistence of the bottlenecks they previously identified. While genAI will kill off many jobs in virtual settings—telemarketers beware—Frey and Osborne write that these limitations will keep AI in the realm of relatively low-stakes tasks for a while yet:
