AI Will Change Your Job, Not Take It

Public fascination with generative AI exploded onto the global scene immediately after OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022. In just two months post-release, the tool hit a record-breaking 100 million active users, outpacing the early adoption growth of both Google and Facebook by a wide margin.

Public reaction has run the full gamut: many are mesmerized by ChatGPT’s ability to generate fast, coherent, logically sound text, while others are gripped by deep anxiety over its impact on jobs and the long-term future of work. Hardly a day passes without news of surprising new use cases for the tool, ranging from helping doctors communicate more empathetically with patients to driving the historic surge that pushed Nvidia’s market capitalization to $3 trillion. Nvidia is the leading manufacturer of the graphics processing units (GPUs) that power the training of modern deep learning networks.

After I give public talks about AI, the most common question I get is straightforward: Will I lose my job to AI? Mainstream media has sounded the alarm for months, and large numbers of workers across industries are deeply concerned. We can gain critical perspective on what to expect from this current shift by examining the impact of another period of massive global transition that unfolded 250 years ago: the Industrial Revolution.

The Industrial Revolution left an indelible mark on every person who lived through it. The invention of the steam engine, for example, exponentially amplified human physical power: it allowed a single farmer to plow 100 times more land than was possible with a horse-drawn plow. As a result, far fewer farmers were needed to produce enough food to feed a rapidly growing population. When Abraham Lincoln signed legislation creating the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1862, 90% of Americans worked in farming. By 1900, 40% of the U.S. population still lived on farms; today, that number sits at just 1%.

Throughout the 19th century, as demand for agricultural labor fell, farmers’ children relocated from rural areas to cities to take new roles in emerging industries. New jobs were created en masse, and public education expanded dramatically to train the new workforce to operate industrial machinery. This transformation unfolded gradually but steadily over more than a century, giving successive generations enough time to adapt to the new world of work.

After the Industrial Revolution, manual labor roles such as agriculture and construction were completely reimagined, but knowledge-focused work such as medicine, law, and teaching remained largely intact. Even within employment categories such as transportation manual labor, the biggest shift was in the required job skills, not the total volume of work available. When automobiles replaced horses as the primary mode of personal transport, for example, the number of blacksmiths in the U.S. fell from 15,000 in 1860 to just 1,000 today—even as the total U.S. population grew tenfold over that period. Today, 600,000 auto mechanics work across the United States, filling the new need created by automotive technology.

Large language models (LLMs), a category of AI programs that can recognize and generate text alongside many other tasks, mark the latest phase of the ongoing information revolution. This revolution began with the spread of personal computers in the mid-20th century and accelerated when the internet went mainstream in the 1990s, and it has reshaped every aspect of modern life while continuing to evolve rapidly.

Over the past 50 years, many experts have predicted that automation would eliminate huge numbers of jobs, triggering devastating social and economic disruption. Why have these dire predictions never come to pass? Existing work shifted to adapt to new technology, and entirely new lines of work opened up to replace any roles that were made obsolete. The information age already created countless new jobs that never existed before its arrival: web developers and designers, digital marketers, data scientists, cybersecurity analysts, and dozens of other role types all exist directly because of the internet.

If LLMs’ impact on the job market follows the same trajectory as the internet, we can expect an explosion of new job opportunities tied to the work people already do. Many of these new roles will be more focused on high-level critical thinking and more satisfying for workers, because LLMs can already take over the routine, repetitive parts of existing jobs. As routine work becomes automated, the scope of what is possible for workers to accomplish expands, creating more choices than ever before.

In short: You will not lose your job to AI. But your job will change.