Not so fast Despite the fears of some of a "jobs-pocalypse," the economy has stubbornly refused to cooperate with the doomsayers. Last month there were 149 million people employed in the United States, the most in history. And in recent months a growing array of new studies have indicated that the relationship between technological advances and job displacement is more complex and nuanced than pessimists have suggested. In November, for example, a study prepared by McKinsey & Co. suggested that adding technology to the workplace is more likely to transform, rather than eliminate, jobs. This echoed a growing consensus that it is important to distinguish "task" automation from "job" automation. The McKinsey study found that less than 5 per cent of jobs can be completely automated based on existing technologies within the next three to five years. Even more striking is a similar study by James Bessen, a Boston University School of Law researcher, who found a positive relationship between the degree of computerisation in a particular job category and employment growth. Those studies support another recent paper written by David Autor, an MIT labor economist known for his research indicating that middle-income, mid-skilled jobs in the United States have undergone a significant decline in recent years.

But writing in the Journal of Economic Perspectives this summer, Autor posed the question: "Why are there still so many jobs?" He pointed out that automation just as frequently complements as replaces labor in the workplace. He predicted that in the future, while AI technologies would continue to replace routinised jobs, they would also increase the number of workers whose jobs require problem-solving, flexibility and creativity. Earlier, Autor had written about what he described as the limits of automation technologies. The challenge for AI designers, he wrote, was embedded in the observation made by the pre-modern-computing era philosopher Michael Polanyi: "We can know more than we can tell." In other words, there are many human activities that cannot be formally described. It is those aspects of human behaviour that computers cannot be programmed to simulate. That view is supported by a new study, "Can Robots Be Lawyers?", a draft of which was posted last week on the Social Science Research Network by Dana Remus, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law, and Frank S. Levy, an MIT labor economist. In the study, they explored which aspects of a lawyer's job could be automated. The research suggested that, for now, even the most advanced AI technology would at best make only modest inroads into the legal profession. Based on their analysis of actual billed hours, the researchers examined the work that lawyers do in broad general categories. They then analysed how much of each category might be displaced by existing AI and automation technologies. As it turns out, being a lawyer involves performing a range of tasks, from reading and analysing documents, to counselling, appearing in court and persuading juries. Indeed, reading documents accounts for a relatively modest portion of a lawyer's activities.

The researchers noted that many of the tasks that lawyers perform fall well within what Polanyi defined as human behaviour that cannot be easily codified. "When a task is less structured, as many tasks are," the researchers wrote, "it will often be impossible to anticipate all possible contingencies." And current e-discovery software programs still require significant involvement on the part of human lawyers, they wrote. In an analysis of actual legal work practices from billing invoice data, the researchers estimated that about 13 percent of all legal work might ultimately fall prey to automation. If that amount of work disappeared in a single year, it would be devastating, of course. But implemented over many years, this amount of technological change would be less noticeable, they said. They added that even in the case of startups like LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer, two sites that can aid in the preparation of legal documents, the impact of automation would more likely be in expanding into underserved markets rather than in displacing existing legal services. Artificial intelligence technologies will continue to wend their way into the workplace, but they are seen as more likely to change work, rather than end it. "Even where automation has made significant progress," the authors of "Can Robots Be Lawyers?" wrote, "its impact has been far less than the headlines would have us believe."

The New York Times