By bizn_fun 
UPS said on Tuesday that it has cut 48,000 jobs since last year. The delivery company’s chief executive previously linked redundancies, in part, to machine learning.
But extrapolating from executives’ remarks during cuts is “possibly the worst way” to determine the effects of AI on jobs, said Martha Gimbel, executive director of the Budget Lab at Yale University.
Company-specific dynamics, she said, are often at play.
“There is a real tendency, because everyone is so freaked out about the possible impact of AI on the labour market moving forward, to overreact to individual company announcements,” Ms Gimbel said.
Certain subsets of the workforce – recent college graduates and data centre employees, for example – in fact are particularly vulnerable to the technology’s adoption.
A recent study from the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis found a correlation between occupations with a higher prevalence of AI and increases in unemployment since 2022.
But Morgan Frank, assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh, has studied unemployment risk by occupation and found that the only workers affected by the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 were in the office and administrative support sector.
For them, their probability of claiming unemployment jumped in early 2023, he said – immediately following the entrance of the chat bot developed by OpenAI.
But for computer and maths occupations, “there is no discernible change in the trend around the launch of ChatGPT”, he said.
“Both tech workers and admin workers – they’re in a rougher job market than they were in a couple years ago,” Mr Frank said.
“I’d be sceptical that AI is the reason for all of it, though,” he added.