ByJohn Werner,
Contributor.
The idea that AI is about to take away millions of human jobs in America has been around for a while now, since perhaps the era of GPT 3 or so, when it started to become clear to business leaders and everyone else that most human jobs can be, to some extent, automated.
As economists know, the entire job doesn’t need to be automated in order to spur huge layoffs at companies. The workloads which can’t be automated can be consolidated to a greatly shrunken full-time staff, leaving the vast majority with pink slips.
Last month, a report by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas showed that the top reason for layoffs was automation, as cited by those making the decisions. Now, as of yesterday, we know that the same is true for the past month of April. The May 7 report showed clearly that U.S. employers shedded 83,387 jobs in April, up 38% from March numbers.
