This article was first published in World Economic Forum and is available via subscription.
AI’s impact on the labor market is often viewed through a microeconomic lens that magnifies the job disruptions and gyrations that will come. But mass unemployment due to a technology is an ahistorical and unlikely proposition. Over the past 80 years, the US economy added 120 million jobs as technological progress remade the labor market.
BCG’s Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak and Paul Swartz expect the same pattern with AI. Its broad impact can drive down costs and prices, pushing up consumers’ real incomes and their demand for new goods and services—creating new employment. Such rejuvenation of the labor market has occurred repeatedly. The world will not be without work, but it will work differently.