According to economist Carl Benedikt Frey, artificial intelligence is likely to cause job losses in industrialized countries. “We will see that far more of this work will be shifted to low‑wage countries, where people can increase their productivity with AI” the influential scholar said in the weekly newspaper “Die Zeit”.
Frey explains that the new technology lowers entry barriers in knowledge work and in content production – for example, writing. “Unskilled, low‑qualified workers stand to benefit because they become more productive with AI and can offer their labor from anywhere. A software developer in Manila earns far less than one in Frankfurt” he observed. The result is a heightened migration of work. “It isn’t necessarily automation that robs jobs from people in Europe or America” Frey remarked, “but for the German worker it feels the same”.
He leads Oxford University’s “Future of Work” programme and is among the world’s most cited labour‑market researchers. In a 2013 study he co‑authored, 47 percent of U.S. jobs were found to be automatable. The paper has been cited over 20 000 times and has shaped the global debate about the future of work.
