LEILA FADEL, HOST:
A lot of people are feeling anxious about artificial intelligence and how it might reshape the workforce in the next few years, especially new college grads. Sally Helm, from our Planet Money team, went on a quest to find a way to think about which jobs might be AI-proof or at least less threatened.
SALLY HELM, BYLINE: Charlie Baker (ph) recently graduated from Rutgers University in New Jersey. He was thinking about heading to law school, but he's delayed that plan for now, because he's worried that AI might soon replace lawyers.
CHARLIE BAKER: If I'm going to graduate with, say, whatever, a hundred thousand dollars in debt to a legal field where they're decreasing the jobs, I mean, that's a really bad situation.
HELM: I went looking for something simple, a list of jobs that might be immune from a robot takeover. And for a moment, I thought I'd found it. I came upon a list that takes a thousand or so jobs and ranks them on something called AI exposure. That's essentially a measure of how much AI can help you do your job. As you'd expect, at the top of the list, more exposed are knowledge workers - writers, physicists, concierges. At the bottom, blue-collar and physical jobs - dancers, welders, short-order cooks. But here's the thing - exposure is not the same as this job will be automated.
DANIEL ROCK: If you're really exposed, it could be great for you.
HELM: Economist Daniel Rock is the man behind the list. His co-authors on his paper about this were researchers at OpenAI. He said if you can use AI to get a lot more productive and the world wants even more of what you're producing, then maybe your field will see an explosion of growth. On the other hand, if news writers get more productive and the world doesn't want even more news articles, maybe you do see job loss. At the same time, jobs at the bottom of the list aren't necessarily safe. Rock gave me a thought experiment. Say everyone fleeing knowledge work decides to become a welder at once.
ROCK: You've got a huge supply increase, and these folks who were working in what they thought were safe roles are seeing their wages fall as other people compete with them.
HELM: So finding AI-safe jobs requires a second framework. Isabella Loaiza is a researcher at MIT. She wrote a paper with the economist Roberto Rigobon, and they kind of turned Daniel Rock's research inside out. Instead of looking at what tasks AI can help do, they asked, what are humans good for?
ISABELLA LOAIZA: Let's look at what is complementary that humans can do very well that machines still can't do that well, at least for now.
HELM: She and her co-author came up with something called the EPOCH score. It's an acronym. Covers empathy, presence, opinion, aka ethical judgment, creativity and a silent H, hope, the ability to plan and execute a vision. High EPOCH jobs, ones that require more human skills, might be more resilient to AI. Managers tended to have high EPOCH scores, and clerical workers scored low. And in our hunt for an AI-proof job, there was one more thing. If you have a very human task to do and a linked task that's very automatable, then you might be in a sweet spot where AI doesn't automate your job but rather augments it. Like for a professor, one of their tasks might be making slides for a lecture. AI can probably do that. But a linked task, giving a lecture, that's pretty human. Or take lawyers.
LOAIZA: The task that is delivering the argument in front of the judge requires a lot of presence, so it's really hard to automate that task. But then writing the brief about it, you know, that task might be very automatable.
HELM: You know, this is actually making me think of a listener who wrote into us. His name's Charlie.
I told Loaiza about Charlie Baker, who's decided to delay law school. She said he's right that the legal field will be affected by AI, but some legal jobs require a lot of human skills.
LOAIZA: All the different occupations that require critical thinking, judgment, even creativity, that is not going to go away.
HELM: Of course, this is all just a theory. AI might get a lot more human-like, or we might just not care that it's only simulating something like empathy. I learned a definitive AI-proof job list doesn't exist. But Loaiza's advice to Charlie Baker - go to law school and don't worry so much about the boring stuff. Really learn how to think.
Sally Helm, NPR News.
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FADEL: If you want to learn more, Sally goes deeper on how AI is changing different jobs and how to think about it on the Planet Money podcast.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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