With Friday’s release of the jobs report, we’ll find out how well the labor market’s holding up as the economy shifts into a lower gear under pressure of the Fed’s elevated interest rates.
We can find out a lot from the monthly BLS survey about the number and kinds of jobs employers are adding — or subtracting — in a host of industries.
But in one of the hottest sectors in this economy, artificial intelligence, there’s hardly a data point to guide us.
The jobs report lists tech jobs under a bunch of headings: computing infrastructure, data processing, computer systems design. Yet artificial Intelligence isn’t one of them.
“It is not going to tell us that,” said Betsey Stevenson, former chief economist at the Labor Department.
To find out if AI is impacting other, non-tech workers, she said she’ll be watching to see who’s gaining or losing ground.
For example: “Do we see unemployment rates of recent college graduates going up?”
That’s because they’re often in jobs requiring computational and analytic skills that AI can do better and faster.
Andy Challenger at outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said he expects increased job displacement in “administrative types of positions, technical writing, going out pulling together large sets of data.”
Companies faced pushback last year, when they started citing AI as a reason for layoffs, he said. Lately, they’ve been blaming “technological updates” instead.
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