AI can be a job creator, not killer

The liberal dream of adding a universal basic income to government welfare programs has received fresh support from the likes of Elon Musk and Sam Altman, major figures in the new economy emerging with AI.

Musk, the world’s first trillionaire, and Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, despite their court feud earlier this year, both agree that governments need to guarantee a universal basic income because tens of millions of people will be put out of work by AI.

“Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI,” Musk posted on X in April. Altman, via OpenAI, has evolved his excitement for universal basic income into a “public wealth fund,” which governments would use to spread a percentage of AI company profits to all their citizens.

Others tend to concur that major job losses are coming. It’s why investors are pouring billions of dollars into AI companies and AI chip makers. It’s why college graduates are booing commencement speakers who mention AI.

Only, here’s the thing: Three and a half years after OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT, the job losses haven’t come. The opposite has happened.

An analysis across six continents by the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers found that the companies most exposed to AI are actually growing jobs faster than companies not exposed to it. They’re using AI to amplify human performance and create new forms of value.

“Far from being a job killer,” the report states, “AI may actually be a job expander when used to unlock growth and enter new markets.“

Why the disconnect between expectation and reality? Well, this would hardly be the first time Silicon Valley has overpromised in an effort to woo investors. But the deeper problem is our collective failure to understand history and the biblical nature of work.

Previous technological innovations destroyed jobs, but they created far more. As the chart below shows, the percentage of Americans working in agriculture collapsed as the Industrial Revolution mechanized the work. But that mechanization also led to a boom in factory jobs.

Manufacturing employment experienced a rise then a fall as a percentage of workers in the United States. It began declining after 1950. The main technology driving this change was automation—the use of computers and robots.

The one constant has been growth in “Other.” This is mostly services—retail and trade, telecommunications, education, finance, health care, government, and so forth.

AI will now automate and eliminate many of those services jobs, which is driving the present fears. But we shouldn’t expect AI to do something that tech innovations have never done before—destroy more than it creates. Why? Because God made men and women to work to meet human needs. And those are never in short supply.

In Genesis 2, God created the man expressly to “work and keep” the plants in His garden to meet the human need for food (Genesis 2:15-16). Then he created the woman to help the man. The man could not, on his own, keep the garden and obey God’s broader command to “multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). So the man and woman together were created to work to meet the human needs for food, companionship, procreation, and for “subduing,” that is, instilling order instead of chaos, which is a need shared by all human communities.

Of course, sin has marred this arrangement, making work hard, prone to failure and frustration. But the basic purpose of work remains—to meet human needs.

Eighty percent of Americans worked in agriculture in 1815 because the most basic human need is food. But once that could be met with fewer people, there was demand for work to meet other needs—manufactured products to clothe and shelter and transport people. And once those needs could be met with fewer people, there was demand for work to meet still more needs—health, communication, learning.

Human needs are the fundamental force that creates jobs. Whatever jobs AI automates, human needs will drive the creation of even more. The data show this process is already at work, and that people are not on the verge of losing the dignity of working for a living. So don’t bet on universal basic income anytime soon. There are plenty of reasons it simply will not work, and those who are pushing the idea have their own agenda.