Generative AI set to affect 300M jobs across major economies

Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/SiJmV

Some key quotes:

- [according to Joseph Briggs and Devesh Kodnani, the paper’s authors] about 7 per cent of US workers are in jobs where at least half of their tasks could be done by generative AI and are vulnerable to replacement.

- Lawyers and administrative staff would be among those at greatest risk of becoming redundant.

- Goldman said its research pointed to a similar impact in Europe. At a global level, since manual jobs are a bigger share of employment in the developing world, it estimates about a fifth of work could be done by AI — or about 300mn full-time jobs across big economies.

The public conversation about unemployment insurance and safety nets (or even UBI) needs to keep growing. We're likely facing a rocky technological transition ahead, potentially the fastest or widest-impacting one so far. Imo, firms that significantly profit from automation (without passing it on to consumers) should bear some of the employment transition costs. But I imagine that'll be pretty hard to achieve with the current state of lobbying and international tax havens - all the more reason to keep the public conversation growing.