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David Autor, a professor of economics at MIT, says he also thinks AI could be trained in this way. While there is a lot of employee surveillance happening in the corporate world, and some of the data thats collected from it could be used to help train AI programs, simply learning from how people are interacting with AI tools throughout the workday could help train those programs to replace workers.

They will learn from the workflow in which theyre engaged, Autor says. Often people will be in the process of working with a tool, and the tool will be learning from that interaction.

Whether youre training an AI tool directly by interacting with it throughout the day, or the data youre producing while you work is simply being used to create an AI program that can do the work youre doing, there are multiple ways in which a worker could inadvertently end up training an AI program to replace them. Even if the program doesnt end up being incredibly effective, a lot of companies might be happy with an AI program thats good enough because it doesnt require a salary and benefits.

I think there are a lot of discretionary white-collar jobs where youre kind of using a mixture of hard information and soft information and trying to make advanced decisions, Autor says. People arent that good at that, machines arent that good at that, but probably machines can be pretty much as good as people.

Autor says he doesnt see a labor market apocalypse coming. Many workers wont be entirely replaced but will simply have their jobs changed by AI, Autor says, while some workers will certainly be made redundant by advancements in AI. The problem there, he says, is what happens to those workers after theyre no longer able to find a well-paying job with the education and skill sets they have.

Its not that were going to run out of work. Its much more that people are doing something theyre good at, and that thing goes away. And then they end up doing a kind of generic activity that everybodys good at, which means it pays very littlefood service, cleaning, security, vehicle driving, Autor says. These are low-paying activities.

Once someones automated out of a well-paying job, they can end up slipping through the cracks. Autor says weve seen this happen in the past.

The hollowing out of manufacturing and office work over the past 40 years has definitely put downward pressure on the wages of people who would do that type of work, and its not because theyre doing it now at a lower rate of pay. Its because theyre not doing it, Autor says.

Frey says politicians will need to offer solutions to those who fall through the cracks to prevent the destabilization of the economy and society. That would likely include offering social safety net programs to those affected. Frey has written extensively on the effects of the first Industrial Revolution, and he says there are lessons to be learned there. In Britain, for example, there was a program called the Poor Laws, where people who were harmed by automation were given financial relief.

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Your Boss's Spyware Could Train AI to Replace You - WIRED