Welcome back to The AI Shift, our weekly newsletter about AI and the labour market. This week, we’re interested in whether — and if so, in what circumstances — people prefer speaking to AI rather than humans. The answer has obvious implications for which jobs may be disrupted by generative AI, but it has some deeper ramifications too.

Sarah writes

In a “fireside chat” at a conference hosted by the US Federal Reserve Board this summer (as always with these things, no actual fireside in sight), Sam Altman of OpenAI singled out customer service agents as one occupation he thought would be “totally, totally gone” because of AI. With “AI customer support bots,” he said, “you call once; the thing just happens; it’s done.” As a result, he said, “it doesn’t bother me, at all, that that’s an AI and not a real person”. But he saw interactions with doctors differently. “Maybe I’m a dinosaur here, but I really do not want to, like, entrust my medical fate to ChatGPT with no human doctor in the loop.”