I’m suss about this paper when it makes this claim:
“where AI is more likely to automate, rather than augment , human labor.”
Where is AI currently automating human labor? Not Software Engineering. Or - what’s the difference between AI that augments me so I can do the job of three people and AI that “automates human labor”
I was also curious about this. Table A1 on page 56 lists examples of positions that are automated vs augmented, and these are the positions the authors think are going to be most augmented (allegedly taken from [0]):
- Chief Executives
- Maintenance and Repair Workers, General
- Registered Nurses
- Computer and Information Systems Managers
After skimming [0], I can't seem to find a listing of jobs that would be augmented vs automated, just a breakdown of the % of analyzed queries that were augmenting vs automating, so I'm a bit confused where this is coming from.
[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04761
When the Stanford paper looked at augment vs automate, they used the data from Anthropic's AI Economic Index. That paper defined the terms like this:
We also analyze how AI is being used for tasks, finding 57% of usage suggests augmentation of human capabilities (e.g., learning or iterating on an output) while 43% suggests automation (e.g., fulfilling a request with minimal human involvement).
From the data, software engineers are automating their own work, not augmenting. Anthropic's full paper is here:
https://arxiv.org/html/2503.04761v1
Sounds like a snake eating it's own tail.
What is the effective difference between augment and automate? Either way, fewer man hours are needed to produce the same output.
If your job is to swing a hammer, then hammer swinging robot automates your job.
If your job is to swing a hammer, then drill robot augments your job (your job is now swing hammer and drill hole).
How that is different from drill bot automating human driller's job is an exercise left to the reader.
> What is the effective difference between augment and automate?
If the field has a future.
> What is the effective difference between augment and automate?
The paper says one of those is impacted, and the other isn't.
So, yeah, not only that's what the GP is asking, but I'd like to know it too.
The total output isn't going to stay the same, though.