Bill Wang

How will Ai impact the Nursing labor market?

Started Feb. 20, 2024

Abstract or project description

Artificial intelligence is the latest in many waves of automation and seems poised to disrupt workers in many areas, including office professionals. In this paper, we first talk about the history of automation, analyzing similar cases. Then, we talk about the potential impact of AI on the labor market in general, distinguishing among two dimensions: complementarity, which is when productivity is increased by incorporating AI, and exposure, which is how much AI will impact a certain profession. High complementarity and high exposure can grow the economy, leading to more jobs, but can also lead to increased wage inequality (Cazzaniga et al.). In low complementarity but high exposure scenarios, AI technology can lead to substitution, which is when jobs can be replaced. In this scenario, income disparity between the 90th and 10th percentile decreased. However, in all scenarios, capital income and inequality between the 99th and 90th percentile increased (Webb).

Finally, we look at nursing as a case study of the impact of AI on labor—focusing on recent technologies such as ChatGPT and LLMs, or near-future ones such as SORA, a text-to-video generator. Specifically, we observe the impacts on labor demand and how patients may react or feel about the usage of AI in nursing. Splitting nursing into a framework of separate tasks, we find that nursing is generally a high-exposure job with a somewhat even split between low-complementarity, medium-complementarity, and high-complementarity tasks. For future job prospects, we consider both saturated markets, like Los Angeles, with strong health care infrastructure, and unsaturated markets, like rural communities. In saturated markets, the increased productivity from recent AI technologies will likely lead to nurse layoffs, as there are few new customers that hospitals could attract. However, even in unsaturated markets, a lack of digital infrastructure may disincentivize healthcare providers from expanding their services. However, an interview with an industry worker provides a more optimistic perspective.