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In the paper they have a subsection that says "One weakness of this study is that we assume that jobs can be broken down into tasks", and that is indeed their fatal assumption.
As I hammer at every opportunity: most jobs are Bullshit Jobs. The belief that a job is 'me being paid for accomplishing economically useful tasks' is such a Red Tribe / small business / results-oriented view of things, which totally ignores the principal-agent problems ubiquitous to the large organisations in which most of us actually work. No, the corporate / state / academic drones of us have jobs because (a) our manager wants to increment his "Number of underlings" ego-counter, or (b) the government makes up jobs as sinecures to make their unemployment statistics look better.
Both of these ACTUAL sources of employment are utterly insensitive to ChatGPT being better at tasks than humans, so actually no-one's job is in danger at all.
That presumes big companies can still compete in a an AI world.
No it doesn't, because big companies already aren't competitive in a pre-AI world. If they were, they wouldn't contain so many Bullshit Jobs. They nevertheless persist, because of administrative state fiat that requires them to contain N% diversity hires and Y% compliance officers.
It's like an aenigmate version of cartelization - all companies currently have their profitably pinned downwards by the administrative state, Harrison Bergman style, and there's no reason the state can't crank up the dial further. The government can irrationally demand additional bullshit jobs for longer than you can remain alive, which is why, to reiterate, I live in a state of fearlessness with respect to AI taking my job. As long as humans are the ones still setting economic policy, no government will accept the mass unemployment that would come with AI-automisation, so it'll either get lawfared into only the niche-st of applications, and / or extra do-nothing middle management jobs will be created to counteract the task-based jobs lost.
Mass unemployment didn't happen any of the OTHER times people proclaimed "These robot's will take R Jerbs". And the people who cry "This time it's different because the AI is so much more effective" are missing the point. The employment impact of new tech has almost nothing to do with how effective the automation tool is, and almost everything to do with whether the political regime of the time thinks it would be a good idea to throw a million people onto the streets simultaneously. I don't think the political regime of the time does think that would be a good idea, and so they'll just legislate against the use of AI, and then poof, employment problem gone, the same way the employment problem went poof with robotic automation - just mandate a bunch of new middle-management admin jobs to absorb the surplus population into.
The only thing that should worry anyone about contemporary AI is if you think it's smart enough to break free of the yoke of the administrative state, such that it is no longer humans setting economic policy.
I agree that the resilience of labor-force participation in the face of the industrial revolution is a strong argument that there'll always be jobs. And I agree that the government will be able to mandate more bullshit jobs. But I also think there are currently a large fraction of non-bullshit jobs (e.g. truck drivers, nurses, policemen), and that our civilization could easily be a lot shittier if they were automated away. I'm imagining something like Saudi Arabia, where everyone just plays politics to get the cushiest BS job.
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