A Job Bright Spot: RAND Explains Its Reality
December 10, 2025
Optimism On AI And Job Market
Remember when banks installed automatic teller machines at their locations? They’re better known by the acronym ATM. ATMs didn’t take away jobs, instead they increased the number of banks, and created more jobs. AI will certainly take away jobs but the technology will also create more. Rand.org investigates how AI is affecting the job market in the article, “AI Is Making Jobs, Not Taking Them.”
What I love about this article is that it says the truth about aI technology: no one knows what will happen with it. We have theories ,explored in science fiction, about what AI will do: from the total collapse of society to humdrum normal societal progress. What Rand’s article says is that the research shows AI adoption is uneven and much slower than Wall Street and Silicon Valley say. Rand conducted some research:
“At RAND, our research on the macroeconomic implications of AI also found that adoption of generative AI into business practices is slow going. By looking at recent census surveys of businesses, we found the level of AI use also varies widely by sector. For large sectors like transportation and warehousing, AI adoption hovered just above 2 percent. For finance and insurance, it was roughly 10 percent. Even in information technology—perhaps the most likely spot for generative AI to leave its mark—only 25 percent of businesses were using generative AI to produce goods and services.”
Most of the fear related to AI stems from automation of job tasks. Here are some statistics from OpenAI:
“In a widely referenced study, OpenAI estimated that 80 percent of the workforce has at least 10 percent of their tasks exposed to LLM-driven automation, and 19 percent of workers could have at least 50 percent of their tasks exposed. But jobs are more than individual tasks. They are a string of tasks assembled in a specific way. They involve emotional intelligence. Crude calculations of labor market exposure to AI have seemingly failed to account for the nuance of what jobs actually are, leading to an overstated risk of mass unemployment.”
AI is a wondrous technology, but it’s still infantile and stupid. Humans will adapt and continue to have jobs.
Whitney Grace, December 10, 2025
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