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AI May Not Impact Tech-Sector Employment, Projects US Department of Labor (investopedia.com) 28

Posted by EditorDavid from the active-jobs dept.
America's Labor Department includes the fact-finding Bureau of Labor Statistics — and they recently explained how AI impacts their projections for the next 10 years. Their conclusion, writes Investopedia, was that "tech workers might not have as much to worry about as one might think." Employment in the professional, scientific, and technical services sector is forecast to increase by 10.5% from 2023 to 2033, more than double the national average. According to the BLS, the impact AI will have on tech-sector employment is highly uncertain. For one, AI is adept at coding and related tasks. But at the same time, as digital systems become more advanced and essential to day-to-day life, more software developers, data managers, and the like are going to be needed to manage those systems. "Although it is always possible that AI-induced productivity improvements will outweigh continued labor demand, there is no clear evidence to support this conjecture," according to BLS researchers.
Their employment projections through 2033 predict the fastest-growing sector within the tech industry will be computer system design, while the fastest-growing occupation will be data scientist.

And they also project that from 2023 through 2033 AI will "primarily affect occupations whose core tasks can be most easily replicated by GenAI in its current form." So over those 10 years they project a 4.7% drop in employment of medical transcriptionists and a 5.0% drop in employment of customer service representatives. Other occupations also may see AI impacts, although not to the same extent. For instance, computer occupations may see productivity impacts from AI, but the need to implement and maintain AI infrastructure could in actuality boost demand for some occupations in this group.
They also project decreasing employment for paralegals, but with actual lawyers being "less affected."

AI May Not Impact Tech-Sector Employment, Projects US Department of Labor More | Reply

AI May Not Impact Tech-Sector Employment, Projects US Department of Labor

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  • But... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Saturday February 22, 2025 @09:41PM (#65188167)

    The pollution generated by all the people wasting energy on this AI bullshit will impact everyone. Make the world worse for profit so you can afford to shield your child from learning about all this shitty things you do for, right?

  • The progress that AI has made over the previous year is astounding. A year ago Github copilot was a bit of a gimmic. It got things wrong more often than it got thigns right. I have just spent the weekend playing with the preview of Github Copilot agent mode - and completed the amount of work it would have taken me a whole working week a year ago in just a few hours, with only minor edits to generated code. And even these could have probably been avoided if I worded my tasks better. The primary programming l

    • Re:I beg to differ (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Saturday February 22, 2025 @11:23PM (#65188309) Homepage

      Sure, it's pretty amazing. I use it too. But it's still far from being able to displace developers. The ones it can displace, won't be missed anyway.

      Your example is small, it's a new piece of software you came up with over a few days. Most of us work with software that has been developed over many years, even decades. These things are complex beasts. AI can't even begin to digest all the code, much less do something intelligent with it. It's going to take humans to write anything non-trivial, for quite some time.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Durrik ( 80651 )
      Not only that. The C-level execs think that AI will help them save on costs and have been holding off hiring more developers because AI is just around the corner. If that's not affecting the industry, I don't know what is. It's holding wages down and drying up the job market. With market consolidation and the monopolistic companies out there (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.), they won't be innovating as much as they can. And they have a good habit of buying up any sort of innovation from smal
      • I use them and they increase productivity, but I can't tell you how many times they have messed something up, which sometimes ends up feeling like a wash. Even really simple things can be very hard for them, and they sometimes get into recursive loops and other challenges. It can be quite frustrating and frankly dangerous for the code. You have to check every line, including those they delete, and they can only do very small things. Worse, I've seen evidence of cognitive decline in some models.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Durrik ( 80651 )
          Exactly. But I find it's often faster to review the code that the AI generates, tell it to fix it, and check again than to write everything myself a lot of the time. I also learn a fair amount of new styles and techniques as I review the code. While wondering things like 'Why the hell is it doing that?' and spending the time to research if it's safe or not and finding out that it is safe because of the latest language standards.
          I've really only used it for writing test code. Since I don't like the idea

      • The C-level execs think that AI will help them save on costs and have been holding off hiring more developers because AI is just around the corner.

        I don't know where you're getting this idea from, but this is total nonsense, and it's not at all how executives think. Hiring is a tactical decision to meet current market demand, not a strategic one, unless it's part of creating a new business unit altogether where mass hiring is part of the plan. Making moves on what you expect to happen in the future is a strategic decision.

        Think about it for a second. You've got customers demanding product X, but you don't currently have the staff that you need to prod

    • So I can make sure to never use it. At best, you want to destroy the pipeline of junior programmers. At worst, you're so incompetent you don't realize you're just copying and pasting from stack exchange and probably don't understand whatever subtle bugs you've introduced into your codebase.

      • They have more value than that. They can generate decent code relatively quickly, but you have to tell them exactly what to do and check it. They can also function like a spell/syntax check, although surprisingly, they make syntax errors in code, which I hadn't seen in their English, and code had more rigid rules. Basically, they are something like random number generators at the end of the day.

  • Someone had better tell the E-suites quick (Score:4, Insightful)

    by molarmass192 ( 608071 ) on Saturday February 22, 2025 @10:09PM (#65188195) Homepage Journal

    Execs are going to need to re-staff back 500K software engineering jobs they've culled since 2022 ASAP.

    Let's dissect this, "the impact AI will have on tech-sector employment is highly uncertain", fair enough, it's hard to predict the future. Next point, "Employment in the professional, scientific, and technical services sector is forecast to increase by 10.5% from 2023 to 2033", wait what? So we don't know what the impact on tech sector employment will be, but we'll forecast rainbows and sunshine for tech sector employment while other sectors will eat all the job losses. Makes complete sense, no hidden agenda here, the 500K layoffs of tech sector jobs are fake news, didn't really happen, hiring is going strong?

    • Execs are going to need to re-staff back 500K software engineering jobs they've culled since 2022 ASAP.

      I doubt it. At the height of COVID you saw a massive shift in consumer demand for digital services. Executives responded by hiring more staff. Some of them (I'm looking in Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, and Google's direction) overdid it by assuming this was going to be a long-term thing rather than just a bubble, mainly because they've had their sights set on cloud growth for so long that they more or less just assumed that it would never really die down. Until it did. And when it did, rsilvergun and drinkypoo

  • Someone go back 5 years ago, to see what their predictions were about the growth of the tech job market, and see how it is now.
    No one saw AI, in its current disruptive form, coming. That is why it is disruptive. And yet these predictions are based around the status quo of this disruption continuing in its current state.
    What if generative AI is actually capable of managing these systems? Why would we not think they could not do so, if AI advances as we predict it might? WOuldn't this completely fuck up th

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Barny ( 103770 )

      Just yesterday Slashdot literally posted that [slashdot.org].

    • That's a very big "what if".

      Cars have been able to drive themselves now for a decade or more. Self-driving taxis have been available since 2017, when Waymo entered the Phoenix market. Are Uber drivers out of work? No, hardly.

      Just because a technology exists, doesn't mean it can immediately displace an entire workforce.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dvice ( 6309704 )

        > Are Uber drivers out of work? No, hardly.

        "Waymo’s share gains have mostly come at the expense of Uber. The early moving Uber controlled 63% of San Francisco’s ride share dollars at the end of 2023. However, as of January 2025, Uber controls less than 55%. Lyft also lost some share, falling to 31% from 35% in the same period."
        https://www.earnestanalytics.c... [earnestanalytics.com]

  • Fire a bunch of people back in 2017, and yeah... forecasts from today may look rosy too.

    But lets play the game. AI is just better tools. Meaning if we used to pay someone to do it before, we might use AI to do it instead. And why not sell what the AI created afterward? Why force AI to recreate the wheel every time?

  • You posted back-to-back stories:

    #1 [slashdot.org]
    #2 [slashdot.org]

    You need to make up your fucking mind which narrative editorials you're going to post, because this mix-and-match shit has got to stop.

    • Clearly, there is no consensus on which direction AI is going to lead us. It's hardly a done deal that AI will suddenly wipe out the entire tech sector.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dvice ( 6309704 )

        > It's hardly a done deal that AI will suddenly wipe out the entire tech sector

        That could happen, but it would mean that it would also wipe out all other sectors. Because if you have an AI that can replace any programmer, you have an AI that can write any software, meaning you can ask it to create a robot to replace a worker in any profession.

        We already have artificial super intelligence that can beat 100% of humans in a narrow tasks, like predicting protein folding or playing go. What we are missing is

  • Says all 3 people remaining at the USDOL.

  • AI May Not Impact Tech-Sector Employment

    Certainly not in the C-Suites anyway.

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