Christopher Pissarides, professor at London School of Economics, who specializes in the impact of automation on work, said labour market can adapt quickly enough to AI-backed chatbots.
The ChatGPT revolution opens the door to a four-day week by providing a major productivity boost for swathes of jobs, according to a Nobel Prize-wining labor economist.Christopher Pissarides a professor at the London School of Economics who specializes in the impact of automation on work — said the labor market can adapt quickly enough to artificial intelligence-backed chatbots. His remark tamp down concerns that rapid advances in technology could bring mass job losses.
“I’m very optimistic that we could increase productivity,” he said in an interview at a conference in Glasgow. “We could increase our well-being generally from work and we could take off more leisure. We could move to a four-day week easily.”
Chatbots, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, have been hailed as a potentially transformative technology that could cause a productivity boom but also expose hundreds of millions of white collar jobs.
Pissarides has previously investigated the impact of automation on jobs through the Pissarides Review into the Future of Work and Wellbeing. He won a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on labor market frictions.
Pissarides said the technology could still take a malevolent turn, such as being used for surveillance or invading privacy. But he said it could make a “big difference” to productivity if used well.
“They could take away lots of boring things that we do at work … and then leave only the interesting stuff to human beings,” he said. The transition for workers will be made less painful by slower adoption by companies despite the technology “moving fast,” he added.
