Is Government Intervention the Solution to the Great AI Replacement?

Most careers today have some possibility of being diminished or replaced by artificial intelligence. This has sparked great fears among many citizens and academics that most people will end up without a job and business elites will keep getting richer. They believe that there will be a vast structural surge of unemployment in which the jobs that many people had for years are no longer needed with no other jobs for people to turn to. However, just like in the Industrial Revolution or other technological shifts through time, the advance of artificial intelligence will actually only cause a temporary change in employment, which can be swiftly changed through reskilling.

The first problem with the AI alarmist mentality is the weak underlying economic theory. MIT economist David Autor breaks the problem down as either removing nonexpert or expert tasks. The removal of nonexpert tasks from expert work allows experts to get more done and command more wages. However, removing expert tasks allows nonexperts to undertake jobs that once only experts could do, which has an ambiguous effect on their salary. Regardless of whether it is tearing down a barrier to skilled work or enabling skilled workers to be more effective, the final result will always be a more effective worker. While workers in the past who had a unique advantage for doing a specific type of work do not have that same advantage anymore, the potential of each worker to produce is much higher. Some workers will have to gain new skills, but the opened career paths for workers who were previously limited more than makes up for that in overall welfare. Some specific jobs will be lost but the potential for new businesses to do more with less labor will allow for the creation of more overall jobs. The advent of AI in business settings is not to be feared, but is instead a tool that will allow each worker to do more.  …