Mack Institute Executive Director Valery Yakubovich and Wharton professors Peter Cappelli and Prasanna Tambe have authored a new article in the Wall Street Journal that discusses current research and predictions on how AI adoption will affect the workforce. Dr. Yakubovich and his co-authors push back on the popular conception of AI as a “job killer” and suggest that a more likely scenario is that AI will create more tasks for workers to do, while also making them more productive.
From the article:
“It is a great thing if LLMs can make current jobs more productive. The savings allows employees to do other things; we hope they will be catching up on the overwhelming amount of work many of them have now rather than adding more tasks. Using LLMs also creates new tasks—“prompt engineers” to learn how to get credible output, experts to judge whether the output is sensible and especially data managers and engineers to corral the incredible amount of unused data we already have.
Rolling all this out won’t be cheap for users. Evidence also suggests that LLM vendors, who are losing large amounts of money now, may well raise their prices in the future. How much the increasingly cheap corporate world will pay for is an open question. But if they do, it will create more jobs than it eliminates, as has virtually all technology in the past.”