Technology

AI and Unemployment: What the 2026 Evidence Shows

AI is changing jobs and automating some tasks, but current evidence does not establish that AI has already caused economy-wide mass unemployment. U.S. and euro…

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AI'S ORIGINS

The Dartmouth Workshop and Early Automation

The 1956 Dartmouth workshop coined the term 'artificial intelligence', while postwar factory automation began reshaping manufacturing employment.

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OFFICE COMPUTERISATION

Personal Computers Automate Clerical Work

PCs and spreadsheets automated calculation and record-keeping tasks, while economist Robert Solow observed computers were 'everywhere but in the productivity statistics.'

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INTERNET TRANSFORMATION

The Internet Economy Emerges

Commercial internet adoption from 1993 restructured retail, publishing and communication, with U.S. productivity growth accelerating measurably by decade's end.

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OUTSOURCING ERA

Globalisation and India's IT Boom

China's 2001 WTO accession and falling telecom costs accelerated offshoring, the same decade India's IT-services and BPO industry scaled into a global export sector.

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TECHNICAL FOUNDATION

Google Publishes the Transformer Architecture

A research paper introducing the 'attention mechanism' became the technical foundation for nearly every large language model built since.

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MAINSTREAM ADOPTION

ChatGPT and Enterprise Generative AI

OpenAI's ChatGPT and rapid enterprise LLM rollout moved generative AI from a research curiosity to a mainstream workplace tool within about a year.

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THE '40% EXPOSED' MODEL

IMF Publishes Its Global AI Exposure Estimate

The IMF estimated roughly 40% of global employment exposed to AI - a task-based model, not observed data - that became the most recirculated AI-jobs statistic in media c…

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EXPOSURE INDEX PUBLISHED

ILO's GenAI Index and the First 'Canaries' Signal

The ILO published its refined GenAI exposure index, while Stanford's 'Canaries in the Coal Mine' study first identified a youth employment gap in AI-exposed occupations.

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THE CURRENT EVIDENCE

ILO's Youth Report and a Mid-Year Layoff Surge

The ILO confirmed global youth unemployment at 12.4% (about 67 million people), while Challenger data showed AI becoming the top-cited U.S. layoff reason for five straig…

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