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June 25, 2025

De-Skilling the Knowledge Economy

Key Points Introduction As David Veldran and I examined in our 2024 report, The Age of Uncertainty—and Opportunity: Work in the Age of AI, forecasts of how artificial intelligence will affect jobs and skills are remarkably uneven and often contradictory.1 This is less a matter of poor methodologies or lack of investigation than it is…

May 2, 2025

Without Qualified Workers, Our CHIPS Investments Could Be Money Down the Drain

Three years ago, the Biden administration, backed by big bipartisan majorities in Congress, launched the CHIPS and Science Act to revitalize domestic semiconductor manufacturing. After decades of outsourcing that reduced the U.S. production share of advanced chips from 37 percent to 10 percent, this “industrial policy” investment was justified as necessary for national security and as a measure to reinvigorate…

May 1, 2025

Tariffs Plus AI Makes for a Rocky Job Market. How Should Workers Prepare?

In today’s labor market, few occupations are safe from AI disruption. It’s been a rough month for hiring plans. The market volatility ignited by President Donald Trump’s tariff policies has made business planning difficult, and that includes any intentions of hiring. Combined with the accelerating adoption of artificial intelligence, disruptions to the labor market don’t…

April 24, 2025

AI “Slop” Comes for Job Interviews

We have all gotten used to the idea that generative AI can help bad writers become better (or at least appear to be better) than they are when left to their own skills. This has resulted in some challenges for hiring managers struggling to cope with the tsunami of applications and cover letters that make…

April 21, 2025

The City That’s Always Working

Among the sectors of the US economy most exposed to AI-driven automation is finance. This is unsurprising given that banking and financial advising are massive knowledge management operations, constantly scanning the globe—like the Eye of Sauron—for opportunities and risks.  One of the main applications of AI in the finance sector is helping firms understand themselves,…

April 9, 2025

Measuring and Building Human Leadership in an AI World

A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, Measuring Human Leadership Skills With AI Agents, presents evidence that artificial intelligence may soon play a central role in evaluating human soft skills—long considered too complex and subjective to measure objectively.  Conducted by Ben Weidmann and David Deming et al. at the Harvard Kennedy School,…

March 25, 2025

AI Talent: It’s Not Just for High Tech Anymore

We appear to be approaching the break-out phase of artificial intelligence’s diffusion across the American economy. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, recent data from the University of Maryland’s  AI job tracker finds that nearly 25 percent of tech job postings earlier this year mentioned AI skills. And it isn’t just the tech sector that’s hiring—finance, professional…

March 19, 2025

AI and Jobs: Measuring Impact and Building New Assessment Tools

Event Summary On March 19, AEI’s Brent Orrell and Shane Tews hosted a panel discussion featuring Alex Tamkin, an AI researcher at Anthropic, and Jason Owen-Smith, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, on how AI is shaping the labor market and workforce development policy. The conversation was moderated by Axios reporter Ashley Gold. The…

March 12, 2025

Stop and Go

Automated driving is picking up speed. Several years ago there was a bit of a moral panic about the prospect of automated freight transportation replacing human truck drivers. These concerns were, in part, about the prospect of automating yet another large and important industry that was dominated by noncollege, male workers. The issue faded from…

March 6, 2025

America’s New Frontier of Opportunity and Inclusion

It would be a king-sized understatement to say that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives have had better weeks, months, years, and decades than they are currently experiencing. From the Supreme Court’s ruling that banned affirmative action in admissions, to the Trump administration’s full-scale bureaucratic offensive to expunge DEI from federal policy and programs, to corporate America’s widespread retreat from years…