AI無所不在，卻未見於近期生產力數據

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AI may be everywhere, but it's nowhere in recent productivity statistics

Forrester principal analyst JP Gownder says jobs eaten by bots don't come back

Interview Analyst firm Forrester’s vice president and principal analyst J. P. Gownder remains unconvinced that AI will revolutionize productivity.

“Where we are today, we're not seeing it,” he told The Register in an interview this week.

During our conversation, Gownder cited US Bureau of Labour Statistics that suggest the advent of the personal computer also did not improve productivity, which improved by 2.7 per cent annually from 1947 to 1973, but just 2.1 percent between 1990 and 2001.

“So despite all those PCs, it [productivity growth] was a lot lower. And [from] 2007 to 2019 it was 1.5 percent. If you look at these numbers, productivity is the foundation of job replacement and of job growth and a whole bunch of things. But when you look at this … you begin to get the picture that information technology isn't measured always in as linear a way into productivity as people assume. It just isn't there.”

That might all change in the future if AI agents improve, but Gownder cannot find evidence that today’s AI boosts productivity.

“[Nobel Prize winning economist] Robert Solow said that by 1987 the effects of the PC revolution can be seen everywhere, except in the productivity statistics. That holds true today as well,” Gownder said. “Productivity just has not soared.”

The absence of a tech:productivity link is known as the Solow Paradox and is often cited when economists consider IT spending.

“The truth of the matter is that with the exception of 2001 to 2007 when productivity was 2.8 percent growth per year, we actually never did see the PC revolution, to the extent that you might imagine,” Gownder said.

Forrester’s most recent AI job replacement research estimates that the technology could uproot 6 percent of jobs by 2030, or about 10.4 million, through robotic process automation, business process automation, physical robotics and generative AI.

Gownder believes jobs that AI takes won’t come back, as typically with job losses after economic rebounds.

“These jobs are lost structurally, like they're gone for good, because they've been replaced. That's not an insignificant hit to the economy,” he said.

To determine the jobs that are at greatest risk of being erased by AI, Gownder and his colleagues considered the roughly 800 job types and 34 skills defined by the US Bureau of Labour Statistics, spoke with 200 companies, and developed a method similar to the one used by University of Oxford scholars Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne in their 2013 study that measured how susceptible jobs are to computerization.

“We use that to then ask ‘Is AI good at these capabilities and these tasks?’ And by building that model, what we're able to do is to understand how strongly AI influences each of those 800-something job categories when we cross reference that with the automation potential that Frey and Osborne came to,” he said. Forrester can then calculate the “automation potential” for many jobs.

The analysts also pondered whether large organizations are capable of using AI and, if so, the technology’s effectiveness.

“A lot of generative AI stuff isn't really working,” Gownder said. “I mean, enterprise, and I'm not just talking about your consumer experience, which has its own gaps, but the MIT study that suggested that 95 percent of all generative AI projects are not yielding a tangible P&L benefit. So no actual ROI. McKinsey has something like 80-something percent that don't. It is just further context that says we're not at a place where lots and lots of people are losing their jobs right now.”

In calls with more than 200 organizations Gownder said researchers found that some of last year’s large-scale job cuts were belt-tightening decisions, not the result of shifting work to AI.

“So then that's not losing a job to AI. That is a financial decision masquerading as an AI job loss. They're just saying: ‘Well, we're hoping we'll fill it with AI at some point.’ So that is a very different proposition than AI is actively stealing all these jobs.”

There is a real phenomenon of a frozen white collar job market in which corporations are not hiring for open roles as a hedge to see if jobs can be duplicated with AI, he said.

“But let's face it, when you have work to do, it's got to get done at some point,” Gownder said. “If the AI doesn't work out, they're either going to have to hire or they're going to have to find some other solution.”

Gownder said historically, the loss of industrial and manufacturing jobs in the USA’s “rust belt” was driven by globalization not robotics, and he sees a similar scenario playing out now with AI.

“Outsourcing is a very popular one,” he said. “They’re firing people because of AI, and then three weeks later they hire a team in India because the labour is so much cheaper.” ®

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