Automation & Artificial Intelligence: How Machines Are Affecting People and Places

Automation & Artificial Intelligence

AI and automation will likely have many positive impacts on the U.S. economy, despite the uncertainty and disquiet they are currently engendering.

The trick is going to be to recall as a nation that technological change doesn’t “just happen” but that it can be shaped.

On the upside, societal efficiency gains and the paradoxical boons of job creation associated with the “productivity effect” each seem possible, with each bringing substantial benefits to workers, firms, industries, and regions.

Yet, the preceding report has almost certainly underplayed such benefits given its inability to “count” potential “new” jobs.

In this respect, if the past is prologue, the demand for new work could be so significant as to offset much of the coming disruption.

In this vein, the challenge for the nation is to avoid fear and embrace change while making the most of it.

However, the past might not be prologue, given the unique nature of AI. After all, even if AI’s rollout does recapitulate some of the economic boons of IT-period automation, the earlier experience is not necessarily reassuring given the economic traumas of the period.

While IT era automation has had many positive impacts on the U.S. economy, it contributed to significant labor market disruptions and a job quality crisis centered on the hollowing out of the
wage distribution.

Those impacts - exacerbated by weak policy responses - have likely contributed to the social and political crises of the current decade.

To the extent, those negative impacts and policy derelictions foreshadow the coming years the AI era could be rough.

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