AI will cost 15m US jobs: Goldman economist

Joseph Briggs, who leads the global economics team at Goldman Sachs Research, said on the bank's Exchanges podcast that he expects AI adoption to displace about 9% of the US workforce, or roughly 15 million workers, over the coming decade.

He likened the scale of the change to that of the technology revolution experienced in the late '90s and early 2000s. He cited examples of industries such as technology, consulting, and graphic design, which are experiencing a loss of 10,000 to 15,000 jobs through monthly employment growth.

"History is on our side," he said, noting that roughly 85% of job growth over the past 80 years has come from entirely new positions created by technology.

Moreover, he referred to how much churn currently exists in the job market because of the creation and destruction of 30 million and 29 million jobs each year, respectively, implying that an increase in hiring would help most of those people who lost their jobs find new work again.

Another guest on the podcast was Neil Thompson from MIT, and he gave a more measured prediction when it comes to AI’s impact on society.

He cited limited data access, legal issues, and cost effectiveness as reasons why it might lag behind technological developments. He stated that automation is more likely to be partial than complete.

According to the BLS, there was only a 57,000 job gain for June, which is only about half of what economists expected, while 74,000 positions from April and May were downgraded.

Unemployment fell to 4.2% but mostly due to people dropping out of the workforce and not gaining employment. Whether this represents the rising tide proposed by Thompson or early signs of a displacement wave feared by Briggs is a matter of debate.

On another note, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, David Solomon, announced early in June that investor attitudes towards artificial intelligence technology have turned decidedly "greedy", as OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX gear up for some of the biggest IPOs in history.