Here’s a glimmer of hope about AI and jobs |
The most recent jobs numbers paint a pretty grim picture of the labor market and the apparent havoc AI is wreaking on it. After warnings about unemployment among recent grads earlier this year, the newest report suggests that AI’s impact is reaching a broader group of workers. There were over 150,000 layoffs in October, which makes it the worst October for layoffs in over two decades, and about 50,000 of those have been attributed to AI. Overall, 2025 has seen more job cuts than any year since 2020.
It’s too soon to tell how much AI is really to blame for these job losses, even if companies are blaming AI in public statements. A team of researchers from the Yale Budget Lab and Brookings has argued that the broader labor market isn’t being disrupted any more by AI than it was by the internet or PCs, and that recent college grads are being displaced due to sector-specific factors. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, however, has predicted that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white collar jobs. So, which is it?
There is a lot we don’t know about what will happen with AI in general — looking at you, AI bubble — and it’s too soon to tell whether AI will actually deliver on its most ambitious promises or be more transformative than past tech revolutions.
But, to shed some light on the jobs question in particular, I called up Neil Thompson, principal research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). He’s been studying everything from why diminishing returns on frontier models will shape AI’s future to how automation changes the value of labor. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
For the past couple of years, your work has pushed back on the idea that automation is always bad for workers and that AI will take all of our jobs. But, in the past few months, we’ve seen tens of thousands of job losses attributed to AI. What’s going on?
My guess is that we have two different phenomena going on at the same time. One is that AI is becoming more prevalent in the economy. I think, for some cases, like customer service, that’s probably pretty legitimate. Indeed, these systems seem awfully good at those tasks, and so, there are going to be some jobs that are being taken over by these systems.
At the same time, it would be surprising to me if........