A Harvard professor says this is how AI will shake up white-collar work
INC.
Christopher Stanton’s research covers the impact of AI in the workplace, so he knows what he’s talking about, and some of the statistics and opinions he voiced should concern pretty much every leader of any size company.
Essentially, Stanton thinks that the suite of AI tools that’s already accessible to businesses could replace a human worker in about one in every three tasks typical in the office. Whether companies actually are choosing to do that is an open question, however.
Stanton also set out an optimistic case for AI replacing human workers, using his own job as professor as a model. Optimistically, he thinks companies may choose to use AI to automate some jobs and thus “free up people to concentrate on different aspects of a job.” As a professor, you might see “20 percent or 30 percent of the tasks that a professor could do being done by AI, but the other 80 percent or 70 percent are things that might be complementary to what an AI might produce,” he said. Here his words echo numerous other AI proponents’ promises about AI.
But when it comes to keeping AI evolution on track — and the expansion of AI has been “probably some of the fastest-diffusing technology around,” Stanton said — this expert has a darker idea. While he admits the jury is still out on whether AI will displace people from whole classes of jobs or not, he does worry that it might upset the entire job market, with many middle-class Americans suddenly out of work, leading to impacts on society.
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