It’s the most urgent question about artificial intelligence — and one of the hardest to answer.
As artificial intelligence becomes more capable, some jobs may remain in demand while others decline. Web designers and secretaries are more at risk than janitors, according to one recent study.
But there’s another dimension to the picture. Some workers will find it easier to adapt, the researchers argue, based on factors like their savings, age and transferrable skills.
Most web designers will be fine. Many secretaries will not. The most vulnerable occupations are largely held by women.
These are the workers who may fare best and worst.
Look up your job in the search box above.
No one has a perfect road map to the future, but researchers at GovAI, which studies technology policy, and the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, used a novel approach to estimate which workers may be most and least able to adapt to AI.
They concluded that many people most at risk if AI transforms work are also the best placed to find new jobs. You can use the search box and interactive chart above to explore which occupations may have bright prospects and which may not.
But history shows that economists and researchers have been terrible at predicting the effects of new technologies on work and workers, so take forecasts like this one seriously but not literally. Even researchers cranking out studies of AI in workplaces caution that they’re making useful but fallible best guesses.
“All the important questions about AI’s effects on the labor market are still unanswered,” Jed Kolko, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, recently concluded. Economists at Anthropic, the AI start-up behind the Claude chatbot, stressed the need for “humility” in their analysis of AI seeping into occupations. (Humility is uncommon in Silicon Valley.)
Sifting through reports about AI-related job displacement will make you dizzy with the apparent contradictions.
One influential Stanford University analysis last year found it’s probable that AI is bleeding jobs from young people in occupations such as software development and customer service, where AI adoption has been fastest. Different research, from the Economic Innovation Group think tank, essentially concluded the opposite, that young workers in those occupations were faring better than their peers in less AI-exposed fields such as fitness training and roofing.