Is the AI job apocalypse finally here? The evidence suggests otherwise | John Quiggin

Detailed summary

The role AI played in job losses at Australia’s NAB, Qantas, Canva and Atlassian is far from clear – but it may prove to have more impact on the stock market than the jobs…

The role AI played in job losses at Australia’s NAB, Qantas, Canva and Atlassian is far from clear – but it may prove to have more impact on the stock market than the jobs market

In 1987, the Nobel prize winning economist Robert Solow remarked: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” At the time, computers had been around for 40 years. Real productivity gains did emerge in the 1990s after the arrival of the internet, but they were short-lived.

Four years after the launch of ChatGPT, the pattern seems to be much the same: lots of hype and excitement but with very little productivity growth. The main economic impacts, as in the 1990s dotcom era, have been a stock market boom and huge investment in infrastructure (fibre optics then, datacentres today), betting on future demand that has yet to emerge.

Still, the announcement of large-scale job losses at NAB, Qantas, Canva and Atlassian, some of them explicitly blamed on AI, raises the question of whether the job apocalypse is finally here. The evidence suggests otherwise.

NAB has specifically denied that AI played a role in its decision, and there is no reason to disbelieve this. The NAB sackings seem to be business as usual for the bank which, since 2010, has announced a mass sacking in most years, sometimes more than one. Yet its total employment numbers have remained unchanged, even though many employees have quit or retired.

Quite simply, NAB’s business model, like that of other banks and big employers, is to hire employees when it needs them and sack them whenever it is profitable to do so. That’s capitalism after all, but it’s a far cry from the days when big employers like banks gave and expected loyalty in dealing with their workers.

Qantas has invoked AI but only, I would argue, to muddy the waters. The decision to outsource 850 jobs to India is consistent with the airline’s longstanding strategy of doing over Australian workers while claiming preferential treatment due to being…

Opening of the article, excerpted from The Guardian Business. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.