Could Artificial Intelligence Help People Work Less, Live Longer

Marc Morial, president of The National Urban League, warned in a 2019 op-ed that automation presents a clear threat to the prospects of Black Americans in the workforce.

JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon is bullish on the prospect of artificial intelligence improving the life-work balance of American employees in the future, according to comments he made during an appearance on Bloomberg TV.

As reported by Fortune, Dimon seems to have embraced the inevitability of AI replacing the jobs of some Americans and made an ambitious claim that, due to advances, people may soon live beyond 100 years of age.

“People have to take a deep breath. Technology has always replaced jobs. Your children are going to live to 100 and not have cancer because of technology, and literally, they’ll probably be working three and a half days a week,” Dimon said.

Dimon’s prediction is ambitious, as American work, on average, approximately 37 hours a week, which is essentially still the standard 40-hour five-day workweek pioneered in America during the 1920s by Henry Ford’s Ford Motor Co.

Although JPMorgan Chase did create a five-year, $350 million reskilling initiative in 2019 to help prepare its employees for a work economy that is more reliant on artificial intelligence and technology, the company’s workforce, per Statista, is 44% white, 21% Latinx, 19% Asian, and 14% Black.

According to a 2022 analysis by the CDC, it is not easy to forecast how sweeping changes to the workforce created by technological advances will be because there are too many variables to say with complete certainty which jobs and sectors will be impacted and in which ways.

In April, MIT economist David Autor was the lead author of research that indicated that since at least 1980, technological advancements have not created more jobs than they have eliminated, but with the caveat that some forms of work were merely transformed and not completely eliminated.

As Autor told MIT News, “AI is really different. It may substitute some high-skill expertise but may complement decision-making tasks. I think we’re in an era where we have this new tool, and we don’t know what’s good for. New technologies have strengths and weaknesses, and it takes a while to figure them out. GPS was invented for military purposes, and it took decades for it to be in smartphones.”

Autor continued, “The missing link was documenting and quantifying how much technology augments people’s jobs. All the prior measures just showed automation and its effects on displacing workers. We were amazed we could identify, classify, and quantify augmentation. So that itself, to me, is pretty foundational.”

According to Autor, augmentation is a fundamental restructuring of how a job is performed, while automation essentially replaces a worker.

“You can think of automation as a machine that takes a job’s inputs and does it for the worker,” Autor explained. “We think of augmentation as a technology that increases the variety of things that people can do, the quality of things people can do, or their productivity.”

Marc Morial, president of The National Urban League, warned in a 2019 op-ed that automation presents a clear threat to the prospects of Black Americans in the workforce.

Morial referenced a report from McKinsey and Company, titled “The Future of Work in Black America,” which painted a grim picture for Black men in particular. “African-American men are overrepresented in the jobs most likely to be lost, such as food services, retail, office support, and factory work,” Morial wrote.

Morial continued, “African-American men also are underrepresented in the jobs least likely to be lost to artificial intelligence. These include educators, health professionals, legal professionals, and agricultural workers.”

According to the McKinsey report, in addition to improving the prospects of areas where Black people work and live, “The public and private sectors will need to implement targeted programs to increase the awareness of automation risk among African American workers. Additionally, both sectors will need to provide African Americans with opportunities for higher education and the ability to transition into higher-paying roles and occupations.”