With the rise of AI, this question has weighed heavily among workers, employers and economists as automation and machine learning promises to make our everyday and working lives easier.

But for many, automation can mean the total replacement of jobs, and if technology does not offer or create alternative jobs, this can be disastrous for people who are unable to reskill.

Furthermore, reskilling may not be enough if the net number of jobs decreases due to the introduction of proliferation of new technologies.

All of these questions and considerations have confounded debate on the positives of technological advancements on society as it stands – less work should equal more free time, the ability to pursue creative undertakings, and the ability to foster greater community. But as it stands, less available work means that more and more people may be unable to afford basic necessities as the cost of living crisis continues to squeeze people’s incomes.

So, where does technology stand, a net positive or a net negative? Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) tried to quantify if the net impact technology has had on jobs since the 1940s, at least in the US.

The study balanced the jobs that have been lost to machine automation against those that had been generated by augmentation – when technology creates new tasks and jobs.

Researchers revealed that automation has been outpacing augmentation since around the 1980s – technology replaced more jobs than it created in the US since the tech boom.

Still, the study developed a way to measure how many jobs technology generated since the 1940s by tracking US patent records and by analysing US census job categories.

This revealed that around 60% of jobs in the US are new kinds of work which were developed since 1940. A computer scientist, for instance, would be a completely novel job that simply would not exist in the 1940s.

From 1940 to 2018, there were two time periods which experienced automation and augmentation differently.

From the 1940s to 1980, many jobs were automated, such as typesetters and elevator operators, but with this, emerging technology created a need for more employees in new positions in engineering, department heads, and clerks in shipping.

From the 1980s, however, machinists and other traditional makers were often replaced by automation. Still, systems and research analysis, as well as engineers, enjoyed further growth in different industries.

According to the research, the negative effects of automation on jobs was more than twice as great from the 1980s to 2018 as in the four decades prior.

There was a still a positive growth in the amount of new jobs from 1980 to 2018, though this was more modest than from 1940 to 1980.

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What Does AI Have to Say? 

“AI is really different,” MIT economist David Autor told MIT News. He co-authored the paper with Caroline Chin, Anna Salomons, and Bryan Seegmiller.

“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 it’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.”

Past patterns do tend to show that new work often squeezes from the middle, creating jobs for the well-educated, and lower-paying jobs, exacerbating the already vast wage gap.

“The new work is bifurcated,” Autor said. “As old work has been erased in the middle, new work has grown on either side.”