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Some experts argue that A. I. is most likely to affect novice workers, whose tasks are generally simplest and therefore easiest to automate. AI technology could cannibalize half of all entry-level white-collar roles within five years. An uptick in the unemployment rate for recent college graduates has aggravated this concern, even if it doesn’t prove that A. I. is the cause of their job-market struggles.

But other captains of the A. I. industry have taken the opposite view, arguing that younger workers are likely to benefit from A. I. and that experienced workers will ultimately be more vulnerable. In an interview at a New York Times event in late June, Brad Lightcap, the chief operating officer of OpenAI, suggested that the technology could pose problems for “a class of worker that I think is more tenured, is more oriented toward a routine in a certain way of doing things.”

The ultimate answer to this question will have vast implications. If entry-level jobs are most at risk, it could require a rethinking of how we educate college students, or even the value of college itself. And if older workers are most at risk, it could lead to economic and even political instability as large-scale layoffs become a persistent feature of the labor market.

“What are those people going to do? How will they be funded? What is the impact on tax revenue?” Economists and other experts who study A. I. often draw different conclusions about whom it’s more likely to displace.

There is a similar pattern among customer service representatives, who are increasingly reliant on A. I. as well. Anything that is administrative, spreadsheet-related, where there’s an email trail, a document-management type activity, A. I. should be able to perform fairly easily, freeing up time for managers to do more mentoring, “C. E. O. s are implying in the data that we don’t need as many of them as we did previously.