AI: May Not Take Away Jobs, but May Improve Work Efficiency

As of September 2, 2024, the question of whether artificial intelligence will take away a large number of jobs has drawn widespread attention. Arolika, a company located in Irvine, California, has launched an artificial intelligence translation tool that enables customer service representatives to communicate with customers who speak 200 languages and 75 dialects. However, the company has not laid off employees and is still actively recruiting.

Nick Bunker, an economist at Indeed, a job search website, believes that although artificial intelligence will affect many jobs, it will not lead to massive unemployment. Major technological events in history have also not caused a significant increase in the unemployment rate. Early versions of artificial intelligence have existed for decades. In 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, bringing artificial intelligence into the public consciousness and triggering concerns about chatbots replacing many jobs.

However, currently, artificial intelligence chatbots have not widely replaced service industry employees as expected. The White House Council of Economic Advisers said it has found no evidence of a negative impact of artificial intelligence on overall employment. The job placement company Challenger, Gray & Christmas has also not seen evidence of large-scale layoffs due to artificial intelligence.

But the threat to certain jobs is not unfounded. For example, Indian entrepreneur Sumit Shah replaced 90% of his customer service staff with chatbots, reducing costs by 85%. At the same time, studies have found that recruitment positions for writers, programmers, and others have decreased after the emergence of ChatGPT. But artificial intelligence can also allow people to do more creative tasks. For example, after IKEA launched a chatbot, it retrained its customer service staff. Research by Stanford University and others shows that customer service representatives who use generative artificial intelligence assistants are more efficient.

After Arolika uses artificial intelligence tools, the processing time of customer service representatives is shortened and efficiency is improved. The company also uses real-time voice and language translation tools to enable customers and customer service representatives to communicate in their respective languages and continues to recruit people who can adapt to new technologies. In short, artificial intelligence may not become a job killer. Instead, it may improve employee efficiency and bring benefits to the economy.