AI's Darkest Hour

FUTURE

TheWhiteBox is an AI optimist newsletter, one that believes AI is truly transformative and a net good to society. However, AI does have a dark side, pretty dark actually, and we are exploring it in depth today.

Using the latest research from places like Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and OpenAI, as well as soul-crushing real-life stories about things going very wrong with AIs like ChatGPT, even deadly, we will examine the risks that AI poses in areas such as job displacement, loneliness, and even more concerning issues like psychosis, and how AI could even threaten our very existence as a species.

And no, I’m not talking about Terminator AIs killing us all, but a more real threat: fertility rate collapse.

Today, we are examining several real-world problems in our society through the lens of AI. But you’ll learn stories and statistics that go beyond AI, enriching your overall understanding of the current state of affairs.

🚨 Readers be warned: this isn’t going to make you feel any better about the future. You will be blown away by some of the stories and statistics we are discussing today.

It’s pretty interesting, but also pretty sad.

Let’s dive in.

First Hard Data on Job Displacement

We have all been hearing these predictions about AI and job displacement, some quite well-thought-out, while others are quite simply outrageous, making it hard to separate signal from noise.

However, a team of Stanford University researchers has presented the first hard evidence (statistically significant) on AI’s impact on jobs.

And it’s not good.

Asymmetric collapse

This very recent study has analyzed, since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, how different jobs, categorized by “AI exposure,” have fared since then across all age groups.

They find that young workers (ages 22–25) in the most AI-exposed occupations, jobs such as software developers and customer service reps, experienced a 12% relative decline in employment, while employment in less-exposed fields (e.g., nursing aides, stock clerks) grew or remained steady.

This relative decline of 12% is compared to the least AI-exposed group, which acts as the control group. This allows verifying whether the results are statistically significant (they are), which means that the probability of observing this data by random chance is very low, providing a statistically sound basis to support the claim that AI is playing a negative role on job prospects for those people.

Importantly, older workers in exposed jobs did not see comparable declines, illustrating that this overall framing of AI as an “entry-level” worker is, in fact, true.

As you can see below, in the fifth quintile of exposure jobs (jobs amongst the 20% most exposed to AI), there’s a clear divergence in headcounts for different age groups, with software developers collapsing up to 12% for software developers:

When looking from a broader perspective at less-exposed occupations, such divergence is not seen or is not statistically meaningful:

And from an overall market perspective, while most age groups continue to experience job growth, younger age groups are seeing…

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