Artificial intelligence is getting everyone excited. It's going to end or improve the world, depending on your optimism/pessimism. The latest hullabaloo was triggered by the release of ChatGPT – the progression of so called generative AI, which doesn't just analyse data but actually creates new content (in this case written text). There's been lots of speculation of what this might mean for education (the end of coursework?), but my focus is on the implications for the labour market. Now the first serious research on that front has arrived.

Remember when loads of academics were confidently predicting that technology, from robots to AI, was about to destroy all our jobs? We went into Covid with record employment before the pandemic, not the robots, knocked a chunk of people out of the workforce. In fact, technology has done something almost worse: giving academics a whole new job producing studies showing how easily technology affects us even on important judgments, from hiring to court cases. Two came across my desk last week highlighting the danger. The first paper turns the tables on the trend for job applicants to be screened by algorithms.