Narrow AI is already displacing workers. My research, with David Autor, Jonathon Hazell and Pascual Restrepo, finds that firms that increase their AI adoption by 1 percent reduce their hiring by approximately 1 percent. And of course narrow AI is powering new monitoring technologies used by corporations and governments — as with the surveillance state that Uyghurs live under in China. It is also being used in the U.S. justice system for bail decisions and, now increasingly, in sentencing. And it is warping public discourse on social media, hampering the functioning of modern democracies.
The labor-market effects of AI may be the most ominous. The U.S. economy once created plentiful good jobs — paying decent wages and providing job security and career-building opportunities — for workers with all kinds of backgrounds and skills. From the end of World War II to the mid-1970s, the United States witnessed not just robust employment growth but also rapid wage growth for both high-education and low-education workers.
This growth stopped long before AI. From the 1980s onward, median wages stagnated. Men with less than a college degree started experiencing sharp declines in their real earnings. During that period, automation and corporations’ off-shoring jobs to other countries drove the declines. But now AI is accelerating the trend, approaching or sometimes even exceeding human productivity in some very specific tasks in offices, warehouses and elsewhere. Many employers, focused on cost-cutting, will jump at any opportunity to eliminate jobs using these nascent technologies.
.. Other applications of AI are likely to exacerbate the growing power of corporations and capital over labor, adding to these troubling trends. AI enables much better monitoring of workers — for example, in warehouses, fast-food restaurants and the delivery business...
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