The Last AI Boom Didn't Kill Jobs. Feel Better?

If ChatGPT and generative AI live up to even a tenth of the hype surrounding them, wide-scale job losses might seem inevitable. But new economic data shows that the last big leap in AI did not coincide with a reduction of jobs in affected industries--despite widespread fears of rapid replacement at the time. In a new research paper, economists looked at the job market across a number of European countries between 2011 and 2019. That's the period during which the AI technique deep learning emerged as a powerful way to automate tasks like transcribing speech, analyzing images, and making algorithmic recommendations for social feeds and ecommerce sites. Back then, deep learning was widely expected to have a broad and swift impact on employment.