LA TRIBUNE DIMANCHE – Massive layoff plans are multiplying in the United States. Is AI really job-destructive?
FABIEN CURTO MILLET – On the contrary. Artificial intelligence is, in my opinion, the only good news for our economies, whose short-term resilience masks long-term fragility. It is even an opportunity for our societies, thanks to three characteristics: speed of improvement, omnipresence, and the ability to support additional innovations, particularly in robotics.
A very narrow circle of technologies – steam engine, electricity, and computing – has successively met these criteria. Far from being a threat, AI could facilitate research and lead to productivity gains. And the job destruction it could bring about is probably overestimated, as shown by a recent study.
Which one? The one led by economist Nicholas Bloom, a professor at Stanford, in coordination with several central banks – the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve, and the Bundesbank – among 6,000 executives in four countries: the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia. They were asked about their employment forecasts for the next three years. These business leaders estimated job destruction at 0.5%, or 1.75 million jobs.
It is not negligible, but it remains far from the catastrophic thresholds of 20% mentioned by some. Furthermore, AI is good for growth. According to several economists, research efforts in the United States would need to double every 13 years just to maintain the same trajectory of GDP per capita growth. The advantage of AI is that it allows for multiplying these efforts.
