AI ‘collusion’ forcing down wages a bigger threat than job-stealing robots: ILO economist

Humanoid robots at the pilot testing and validation platform at the Beijing Innovation Centre of Humanoid Robotics on March 20.

Photo: AFP The threat to employment posed by artificial intelligence was not a “robot apocalypse” that would steal jobs, but “algorithmic collusion” that could quietly erode wages and workplace safety, Ekkehard Ernst, the International Labour Organization’s chief macroeconomist, warned in Beijing on Tuesday.

While public anxiety frequently centred on the potential for AI to trigger a mass wave of unemployment, Ernst said its disruptive potential had been overestimated. “I don’t think that we are anywhere close to major disruption of labour markets,” he said.

Citing a study released by American AI company Anthropic this month, Ernst noted a stark “implementation gap”.

The study showed that while AI was theoretically capable of performing many high-paying tasks, real-world adoption lagged significantly due to regulatory hurdles, system integration complexities and the need for human oversight.

While AI was having an impact on specific sectors – notably software engineering – and entry-level roles, Ernst said broader concerns about its impact on youth employment were misplaced.

Comparing China’s youth jobless rates – 16.1 per cent for 16- to 24-year-olds and 7.2 per cent for 25- to 29-year-olds – to those of some European countries where the figure could be over 20 per cent, he said they were not exceptionally high.

Instead, the struggle for young people was “mostly related to the current economic slowdown, more than to specific AI”.

In the labour market, AI was more about reshaping and transforming jobs rather than massively replacing them, he said, because it allowed workers to focus on complex, high-value-added tasks.

Ernst dismissed the “fixed-pie fallacy” – the idea that labour demand is finite.

Using the automotive and healthcare sectors as examples, he said that as increased efficiency lowered prices, market demand rose, increasing the need for labour. “Considering the demographic developments that we see in China, we are risking running out of workers, not running out of jobs,” Ernst said, adding that in ageing societies like China, AI could bridge critical gaps in elderly and medical care. “So the job has not disappeared.

It’s just different.” But he also acknowledged that people faced the challenge of lifelong learning and reskilling as the labour market was reshaped by technology – a process that required time a

原文链接: 南华早报