• As AI tools revolutionize business, workers are worried they're at risk of losing their jobs.

• Yet Noah Smith, who writes the Noahpinion newsletter, contends there are nuances amid the expected impact.

• "We've been deploying automation technology for centuries, and as of 2023, pretty much every human who wants a job has a job," Smith wrote.

With businesses now deploying AI tools to do everything from translating speech to building language learning models for big law, many workers are worried they might soon be out of a job.

Yet Noah Smith, the writer behind the popular Noahpinion economics newsletter, contended in a post on Monday that people shouldn't worry about losing their jobs to automation just yet.

"The "folk model" of automation is that it throws humans out of work — today you had a job performing some sort of valuable work, and tomorrow you're on the welfare rolls," Smith wrote.

"We've been deploying automation technology for centuries, and as of 2023, pretty much every human who wants a job has a job," Smith wrote, "but there's basically no way to get people to believe that this next wave of automation will be the one that finally sends humans into obsolescence."

What exactly does automation mean?

In his post, Smith examined several studies on job automation over the years from researchers at firms ranging from Citibank to PriceWaterHouseCoopers.

Smith points out that the term "automation" in these studies is never clearly defined and together they illustrate hypotheticals that poses different levels of "replacement." Some scenarios, such as "You're going to get new tools that let you automate the boring part of your job, move up to a more responsible job title" even present newfound benefits.

That means it's hard to draw sweeping conclusions about what automation means for any particular individual.

The other issue Smith pointed out is that these studies don't touch on how the labor market will change overall. "If one job is destroyed by automation and two more are created for higher wages, workers obviously won out," he suggested. Yet studies on the topic only seem to focus on automation, which can suggest that workers are the losers in the situation, even if that's not really the case, Smith wrote.