CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

AI Won’t Necessarily Lead to Mass Unemployment: The Case of the Financial Industry

There is widespread concern that AI will lead to mass unemployment in the years ahead. As I and others have pointed out, we have yet to see any evidence of this in the data on job growth or productivity. But maybe we just have to wait a bit longer.

But the idea that AI will eliminate all the jobs ignores the ways that creative entrepreneurs can develop new industries that require hundreds of thousands, or even millions of employees. These new industries may contribute nothing to well-being, but they create jobs.

The best example of this sort of waste is the financial industry. It would be hard to envision a sector where the technological developments of the last half-century should have cost more jobs than finance. Back in the 1970s we didn’t even have simple spreadsheets. People had to use adding machines for basic calculations, if they didn’t do them by hand.

The automatic teller was just coming into use in the 1970s. Few banks had them, and they certainly weren’t available in........

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