AI could destroy the labor market. We already know how to fix it.
Stop overthinking this
Earlier this week, a prominent Democratic research firm, Blue Rose Research, released polling about the public reaction to artificial intelligence technology. Among other things, Blue Rose found that 54% of Americans think that unemployment caused by AI should be dealt with by “creating good-paying jobs” while only 17% favored providing “direct income support.” A further 49% favored a special tax on AI profiteers to finance these kinds of programs.
What’s actually interesting about this Blue Rose polling is not really the answers, but the questions and the underlying sentiment that we somehow need fresh new policy solutions to deal specifically with the negative distributive effects of AI.
In reality, the most boring, well-established social democratic policy approaches will work perfectly fine. That we have this kind of exotic discussion is emblematic of our deeply impoverished policymaking environment.
When thinking about the potential negative impacts of artificial intelligence, it is important to distinguish between the technology’s direct effects on things like production, education, and leisure (which may show up as AI cheating tools that hurt learning or AI companions that displace real social connection) and its indirect effects on things like the distribution of wealth, income, and consumption in society.
It is hard to know in advance what to do about the direct effects, both because we cannot really predict them and because each will likely require a specific, not general, solution. The opposite is true for managing the distributive impact of these technologies.
