Nowadays there seems to be nonstop discussion about AI, with much of the conversation focused on whether there’s a speculative bubble or whether the chipmaker Nvidia is really worth $5tn or whether OpenAI will beat its rivals in developing new generations of artificial intelligence. But the vast majority of Americans – just like the vast majority of Europeans and Asians – couldn’t care less about those things.
Their big concern is whether AI is going to cause huge layoffs and create a disastrous job market, especially for younger workers. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, a leading AI company, fed those fears when he said that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years and increase unemployment in the US to 10% to 20%. In October, Bernie Sanders, the top Democrat on the Senate education and labor committee, issued a report saying AI and automation could replace up to 97m jobs in the US over the next decade.
Such predictions fuel worries that AI will make today’s enormous income inequality even worse as the already wealthy investors in AI grow even wealthier while millions of workers lose their jobs and perhaps form a new underclass struggling to make ends meet.
In a recent panel discussion I moderated, Daron Acemoglu, an MIT economist and winner of the 2024 Nobel prize in economic sciences, said there were essentially two routes for developing AI: an anti-worker route and a pro-worker route. He voiced dismay that tech companies were focused on the anti-worker route – a route that aims to develop AI in ways that maximize automation and maximize job reductions.
In that panel discussion at the City University Graduate Center in New York, Acemoglu said AI could take “very different directions, and which direction we choose is going to have great consequences in terms of its labor market impact”. He said that today’s AI “craze is really an automation agenda” which “is going to eliminate more and more jobs”.
Acemoglu called for “a different future” with “pro-worker AI”. In his view, it would be far better if society and government could get tech companies to develop AI in ways that, instead of maximizing layoffs, increase workers’ skills so that workers become more capable and valuable and employers are eager to keep them. That way AI would result in far fewer job losses.
Acemoglu said pro-worker AI would be far better for productivity, social cohesion and holding down income inequality. He acknowledged, however, that pro-worker AI is “not so good for the business models of the big tech companies” – their models seek to maximize profits and automation.
To get AI companies to embrace a pro-worker approach will undoubtedly take considerable pressure from government and society. The Biden White House held discussions with labor leaders about how to make AI less harmful to workers. The Biden administration and various Biden-era agencies adopted several pro-worker AI…
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