The rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) tools has the potential to alter nearly all aspects of society with large but uncertain impacts on the economy and labor market. Generative AI has progressed quickly in the last few years, in particular with the release of ChatGPT, prompting governments to grapple with ways to encourage AI development within the bounds of ethical and national security concerns. AI tools may disrupt several industries from the music industry and copywriting to manufacturing and human resources. Many questions remain around AI, including inaccurate decision-making and algorithmic bias (e.g., facial recognition doing a worse job of identifying black female faces); lack of interpretability; information provenance (e.g., privacy concerns, deep fakes, and misinformation); and supply chain issues. AI may also increase inequality as AI tools consolidate the wealth and dominance of particular companies and individuals.
To maintain American leadership in AI and ensure a just integration of technology, the federal government, including the national labs, should work with technologists and other stakeholders to establish a safe and ethical structure for AI development. While there are a range of plausible scenarios of how this new technology transforms the economy and our workforce, substantial American leadership and public investment are needed to secure our competitiveness and national security while also ensuring that all U.S. citizens are uplifted by these changes and safeguarded against risks.
AI could fundamentally alter the U.S. labor market and may affect the demand for different jobs.
AI technologies may lead to fundamental changes in the U.S. labor market through their potential to reduce labor costs and increase productivity in ways that could increase global GDP by 7% each year. In doing so, these technologies would both expand economic opportunities in some sectors and reduce employment and activity in others. For example, one issue in the current Hollywood strike is the future of generative AI in the entertainment industry and its potential to disrupt writers’ and actors’ livelihoods.
Jobs across pay, skill, and experience spectrums could be affected by AI given that references to AI skills are increasingly common in job postings across virtually every sector (Figure 1). However, the precise impacts on each sector remain uncertain given the novelty of these technologies. AI may lead to job polarization where jobs become more concentrated in high- and low-paying occupations because routine tasks that are most susceptible to AI are predominantly in jobs that pay in the middle of the income ladder. However, other recent research suggests that tools like ChatGPT can boost productivity with certain writing tasks and narrow the productivity gap between more and less experienced customer service workers, indicating that AI may provide skills to grow the middle class. Some more complex occupations are also exposed to AI tasks that involve detecting patterns, making judgments, and optimizing processes, such as clinical lab technicians, chemical engineers, optometrists, and power plant operators. Together this suggests that technological advances in AI will impact the labor market in complicated and uncertain ways.
