The threat to employment posed by artificial intelligence was not a “robot apocalypse” that would steal jobs, but “algorithmic collusion” that could quietly erode wages and workplace safety, Ekkehard Ernst, the International Labour Organization’s chief macroeconomist, warned in Beijing on Tuesday.

While public anxiety frequently centred on the potential for AI to trigger a mass wave of unemployment, Ernst said its disruptive potential had been overestimated.

“I don’t think that we are anywhere close to major disruption of labour markets,” he said.

Citing a study released by American AI company Anthropic this month, Ernst noted a stark “implementation gap”. The study showed that while AI was theoretically capable of performing many high-paying tasks, real-world adoption lagged significantly due to regulatory hurdles, system integration complexities and the need for human oversight.

While AI was having an impact on specific sectors – notably software engineering – and entry-level roles, Ernst said broader concerns about its impact on youth employment were misplaced.

Comparing China’s youth jobless rates – 16.1 per cent for 16- to 24-year-olds and 7.2 per cent for 25- to 29-year-olds – to those of some European countries where the figure could be over 20 per cent, he said they were not exceptionally high.

Instead, the struggle for young people was “mostly related to the current economic slowdown, more than to specific AI”.