Kevin Schaul and Shira Ovide, writing for The Washington Post:
A flood of sometimes conflicting analyses shows the yawning gap between what little is known about how AI is changing work and everyone’s understandable hunger for certainty. The divide lets Americans, business leaders and policymakers cherry-pick their preferred narratives. If you’re afraid of being cast aside for AI, there’s informed and uninformed evidence to fuel your nightmares. There’s plenty of support, too, if you think your job is safe.
Schaul and Ovide report on GovAI/Brookings research that adds a second axis to the usual AI jobs analysis: not just which occupations are exposed, but which workers can adapt if displaced.
While web designers and secretaries both scored high in the research for exposure to AI, they diverged in their estimated ability to adapt. Secretaries were among the 6.1 million largely clerical and administrative workers considered both highly exposed to AI and with the lowest estimated adaptability.
Education, varied work experience, wealth, age, geography: the researchers used these factors to estimate adaptability. For designers, the same skills that make them exposed also make them adaptable. For clerical workers, the exposure comes without the safety net.
Women make up about 86 percent of those most vulnerable workers, the researchers said, suggesting the negative effects of automation won’t be borne equally across society.
But 6.1 million clerical and administrative workers land in the high-exposure, low-adaptability quadrant. Women hold 86 percent of those jobs. The AI displacement conversation in tech is self-absorbed. The people facing the hardest transitions aren’t designers.
