AI Will Have a Greater Impact in Advanced Economies

At a Paris conference in February 2025, tech CEOs of the companies most involved in the development of AI made some high-flown statements. According to Sundar Pichai (Alphabet), “AI will be the most profound change of our time,” while for Sam Altman (OpenAI) “every inhabitant on Earth will be able to accomplish more in a decade than the person with the greatest impact can today.” In reality, the repercussions of recent, very rapid technological changes in the workforce are still uncertain, fragmented and difficult to predict. On the one hand, AI promises to increase productivity and to complement human intelligence; on the other, it seems to be able to replace humans in many work tasks. In other words, there could be major productivity gains in many occupations, while others could be decimated by declining demand — or even replaced altogether. A 2024 report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicts that artificial intelligence will influence 40% of jobs around the world, and up to 60% of jobs in advanced economies. 

More recent data, collected and processed by the Anthropic Economic Index (2025) — an open source initiative that monitors the use of AI in the job market and economy — says that to date, AI is still mostly used for augmentation of human capabilities (57%), compared to automation (43%) where it directly performs specific tasks by replacing humans. Until now, it appears that the tasks and occupations with the greatest adoption of AI are those associated with mid to high-level jobs — such as programmers, software engineers and data scientists — while it seems to have less impact on more senior roles that require decision-making skills and strategic vision. In contrast to previous waves of change due to the evolution of technology that first affected low-skill workers, AI is — for the most part — impacting advanced economies for now precisely for their high-paying, high-skill intellectual jobs. So it is not surprising that the professions requiring more manual and physically demanding work are, at the moment, less impacted. However, these scenarios — just like technology itself — are constantly evolving. On the one hand, it is clear that eventually even manual labor and service workers will be replaced by automation. On the other, the continuous improvement of AI’s capabilities could lead to the reversal of the current prevalent role of augmentation of human skills in favor of automation, that is, the total replacement of workers’ roles. 

These scenarios, which are not a long way off, raise profound questions — both on the individual and collective level — about growing inequality and what the absence of work means for people’s lives. Regarding the first point, recent studies (Otis et al., 2023; Roldan-Mones, 2024; Toner-Rodgers, 2024; Kim et al., 2024) suggest that — contrary to previous opinions — low-skill workers will not receive the benefits from opportunities created by AI, and the income and relevance gap will become even wider between low and high-skill workers. Additionally, high-skill workers will be at an advantage as they are better equipped given not only their expertise, but also their critical thinking and discretion skills in addressing questions and evaluating the results of AI actors. History suggests that the greatest technological changes favor those with more skills, and create additional benefits for those with good judgement, agility and experience in navigating complex, information-rich contexts. While AI will increase productivity in the short-term, the long-term repercussions will be a decrease in many workers’ skills and a rise in automated tasks for numerous professions, including even non-routine and creative jobs. In the coming years, we can obviously expect — as with all waves of technological change — the creation of new jobs and occupations that do not yet exist, of which we cannot even imagine. However, what differs now is that the philosophy with which these technologies were created is not the same of other technological revolutions. In the past, the objective was to improve or complement human labor (sociotechnical theories), whereas today — and the tech industry has explicitly said so — it is to replace it, both in practice and logic. Primo Levi wrote in The Wrench, “If we exclude prodigious and individual moments that fate may bestow upon us, loving one's work is the best concrete approximation of happiness on earth.” With the advent of AI, we may ask: what will be left for humans if they are forced to no longer work?