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 policies (for instance, to limit harmful AI surveillance), but his administration never issued recommendations or regulations to steer AI’s future in a way that would minimize layoffs. Perhaps that would have happened in a second Biden term.
Three days after returning to the White House, Donald Trump – with tech billionaires having helped finance his campaign and inauguration – rescinded Biden’s modest efforts to make AI less harmful. Trump essentially gave the green light to AI companies to pursue whatever strategies they wanted, workers and the public be damned. On Thursday, he issued an executive order aiming to block any state laws restricting AI.
“The Trump administration has really changed the trajectory of the conversation about AI,” said Amanda Ballantyne, until recently the director of the AFL-CIO’s Technology Institute. (The AFL-CIO is the main US labor federation.) “I wouldn’t say we’re seeing a great trajectory right now for what AI will mean for workers. We’re living through a live-action experiment as tech companies and employers try to figure out how to use this new technology, with many people concerned that it will be destabilizing and bad for workers.”
It would be great if the path forward for AI could follow Germany and Scandinavia’s model of having industry, labor and government work together to develop policies that help business and workers alike. “We’re in new territory with AI technology,” said Ballantyne, now a senior fellow at New America, a progressive thinktank. “We should take lessons from deindustrialization in the United States, where our anemic policy response to the negative effects of free trade left many working people behind. We can, and absolutely should, use the government to incentivize the development of pro-worker AI and smart regulations, as we’ve done previous times in history.” Ballantyne pointed to Franklin Roosevelt’s program that led to the electrification of hundreds of backwards rural communities, helping to improve living conditions and spur economic development.
“The Democrats,” Ballantyne said, “should make this a core part of their platform, that it’s possible to use government to create the kind of economy we want” – in this case, to incentivize tech companies to develop AI in more pro-worker, less destructive ways.
Four decades ago, Wassily Leontief, an NYU economics professor who won a Nobel prize for economics, hypothesized, somewhat playfully, about a future with so much automation that just one factory worker would be left, and that worker would turn a switch, and all the world’s manufacturing would get done. Leontief worried that the factory owners would get all the benefits and workers would get pauperized.
He asked two crucial questions: “Who will get the benefit? How will the income be distributed?” Those questions are arguably more relevant today.
With this in mind, the US and other wealthy nations should move quickly to adopt targeted policies that protect workers from the anticipated negative effects of AI, especially massive layoffs.
The government should arrange for greatly expanded efforts to retrain laid-off workers and get them back into the workforce – one option would be to make community colleges free. It would be terrible for those workers – and society – if AI results in millions of workers becoming unemployed for years.
If AI causes massive layoffs, that could mean that millions of workers and families lose a vital necessity: health coverage. With all the job churn AI is likely to cause, we should jettison our system in which workers receive health coverage through their job. We should instead embrace a system with guaranteed health coverage for everyone, perhaps in the form of Medicare for All.
As AI takes over more and more of workers’ tasks, employers should move to a four-day workweek – with workers continuing to receive the same salaries – as a way to spread the work, reduce layoffs and give workers some of the gains from AI.
Some tech executives have called for universal basic income (of perhaps $1,000 a month) so that everyone receives a minimum income in case there are huge layoffs. Unfortunately, most UBI proposals would give an inadequate amount, perhaps $12,000 a year, to those most in need, while giving that same amount to tens of millions who are working and don’t need it. To my mind, a more generous unemployment insurance system, with higher weekly benefits and more weeks of benefits, would be better and fairer than UBI.
All this will require higher taxes. As AI makes the very rich even richer – giving them even more money that they don’t need and don’t know what to do with – lawmakers shouldn’t hesitate to increase taxes on the ultra-rich to finance an improved safety net that includes universal health coverage, beefed-up retraining and expanded unemployment insurance.
Last but not least, we should ensure that workers have a voice in developing AI so it isn’t focused exclusively on helping tech companies maximize profits, automation and layoffs. Biden was dead serious about giving workers a voice in shaping AI, but Trump seems to have little interest in that idea. The billionaires and tech bros who have his ear (and are helping finance his gilded ballroom) despise labor unions and aren’t keen on giving workers an effective voice.
Bottom line, once again, is there needs to be a bottom-up movement, this time to pressure lawmakers and tech companies to give workers a say in developing AI and to create a stronger safety net.
Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labour and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues
