Table of Contents
- What Does Generative AI Mean for the American Worker and Labor Policies?
- Recommendation
- Take-Aways
- Summary
- Generative AI will produce positive and negative externalities when it comes to labor.
- Gen AI focuses on automating nonroutine work.
- AI technology will transform the global labor dynamic.
- About the Authors
What Does Generative AI Mean for the American Worker and Labor Policies?
Learn how generative AI impacts the American workforce. This report summary evaluates artificial intelligence’s effect on white-collar jobs, productivity, and labor policies.
Read the full article to understand how artificial intelligence will reshape various industries and discover what steps stakeholders must take to protect the modern workforce.
Recommendation
Over the next several decades, generative AI will change the nature of work by boosting productivity. Yet its accompanying challenges might include job losses, labor migration, and industry disruption. Policy experts Molly Kinder, Xavier de Souza Briggs, Mark Muro, and Sifan Liu explore the many ramifications of generative AI for employers, employees, and entrepreneurs. Executives and investors will find this a robust and useful examination of generative AI and its role in the future of work.
Take-Aways
- Generative AI will produce positive and negative externalities when it comes to labor.
- Gen AI focuses on automating nonroutine work.
- AI technology will transform the global labor dynamic.
Summary
Generative AI will produce positive and negative externalities when it comes to labor.
In 2022, the creators of ChatGPT-3.5 released generative AI to the world. The new technology provided an alternative to conventional work and content creation. Though innovations and automation have disrupted labor models for centuries, Gen AI presents a new, unique set of issues. For many stakeholders, one emerging concern is that it will replace workers as the technology evolves and its uses multiply across industries.
“We don’t know a lot yet about how exposure to generative AI will translate into real-world impacts on workers.”
Due to the rapid rise of Gen AI, businesses, workers, and governments have not properly prepared to assess the promise and potential economic peril of the widespread adoption of the technology. Some observers believe Gen AI could be a panacea for labor and the economy; others view it as a danger to livelihoods and prosperity. Scant government policy on AI regulation or worker protection exists, as companies — “employer deployers” — quickly embrace the technology. The push/pull dynamic between productivity acceleration and creative opportunity, versus disappearing jobs and the eroding protection of intellectual property, fuels the most virulent debates.
Gen AI focuses on automating nonroutine work.
Unlike technology breakthroughs of the past, which centered on automating ordinary skill-based work, Gen AI focuses on nonroutine work, such as analyzing, programming, forecasting, writing, creating, communicating, and persuading. Experts predict that nearly one-third of workers in “creative white-collar” professions could see more than half of their activities conducted through Gen AI without human intervention.
“The sectors that face the greatest exposure are dominated by higher-paying fields with advanced degree requirements, such as STEM pursuits, business and finance, architecture and engineering, and law, in addition to lower paying, middle-skill office and administrative support occupations.”
From an economic perspective, Gen AI will involve white-collar professions to a far greater degree than it will involve blue-collar occupations. Gen AI could negatively affect middle-income roles, administrative jobs, and clerical positions. These jobs tend not to have labor union protections.
AI technology will transform the global labor dynamic.
Forecasts of Gen AI’s impacts on the labor force and employment ecosystem prove mostly speculative at this early juncture, but experts are considering potential outcomes in multiple areas, including labor displacement, income inequality, gender and race considerations, and the capacity of Gen AI to augment rather than displace job roles and duties.
“Tied to the question of how gains and losses will appear is the question of how both, in turn, will impact inequality across multiple dimensions: income, wealth, gender, race, educational attainment, and geography.”
Across the global labor landscape, stakeholders must address Gen AI’s opportunities and problems in critical areas such as the dynamic between the worker and the employer-deployer. The expanding roll-out of the technology will likely require empowering employees with stronger representation in the workplace, and it will affect the direction of government regulatory policy.
“Generative AI is poised to rewire how many of us work and earn a living. As the technology advances, however, the future of work will not be determined by technological capacity alone.”
Generative AI will disrupt the labor ecosystem, and stakeholders must not let the technology proliferate or evolve without knowledgeable business, worker, and public policy governance.
About the Authors
Molly Kinder, Xavier de Souza Briggs, Mark Muro, and Sifan Liu are professionals at the Brookings Institution.