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February 27, 2025
Powering AI: The Energy Workforce Crisis No One Is Talking About
We are used to thinking about how burgeoning artificial intelligence (AI) may affect jobs and employment. Usually, this means fixating on whether or not AI systems will replace or augment human labor. What is less often considered is the way AI will, and in fact already does, spur new demand for labor that has nothing…
February 24, 2025
AI and American Dynamism
Last year, I published a report, The Age of Uncertainty, on the challenges in understanding and estimating the job and skill impacts of artificial intelligence. One of the big problems was how quickly expert estimates become outdated, not due to any fault on the part of the experts, but because of how rapidly AI is evolving….
January 3, 2025
AI and People: Better Together
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has sparked widespread debate about its potential to displace highly-skilled workers. Recent research by Emilio Colombo and his colleagues, Towards the Terminator Economy, offers a more encouraging view. The authors’ findings suggest that among more highly skilled workers, generative AI may actually enhance productivity, increase wages, and boost employment….
October 18, 2024
What’s Working in America’s Workforce System
The American workforce is undergoing rapid changes driven by demographic shifts, technological advancements, and evolving skill requirements. During this time of rapid disruption, the question arises: How can our training programs and workforce development systems do a better job of supporting workers and employers to meet their skill and employment needs? The Workforce Futures Initiative (WFI)—a collaborative research effort between…
October 8, 2024
Unplanned Obsolescence
Tech sector layoffs have grabbed a lot of headlines over the past two years since the Federal Reserve ended its zero interest rate policy that enabled vast investment in research, development, and high-tech start-ups and as artificial intelligence (AI) has begun to reshape a growing number of sectors. A recent article from the Wall Street Journal highlights a harsh…
October 3, 2024
The New “Old Girls Network” in the American Workplace
One of America’s great success stories has been the gradual opening of opportunities for women in nearly every field, from athletics to higher education. Nowhere has the change been more profound than in the workplace. In 1970, just over 15 percent of all management jobs were held by women. According to McKinsey, that figure has now risen…
August 20, 2024
The Robots Are Going to Take These Jobs. Thank Goodness.
Today, The Verge profiled a new Tesla project aimed at training robots for routine materials movement. The company is hiring workers between 5’7” and 5’11” to move 30-pound packages while wearing sensor arrays and virtual reality goggles. These workers will provide the motion capture data to train Tesla’s Optimus robots, which will eventually begin taking over this…
March 20, 2024
When Workers Say They Value Flexibility, They Mean It
FlexJobs, a career services firm specializing in remote and hybrid jobs, is out with another of its regular surveys on American attitudes towards job flexibility. Consistent with our own surveys, which found Americans valued flexibility on the job above all other factors, including pay, the new FlexJobs data takes the analysis a step or two further. It appears that…
February 5, 2024
The Biden Administration’s War on Flexibility at Work
One of the signal errors of Biden administration policy has been its tendency to take regulatory actions that reduce the flexibility of the economy generally and the labor market in particular. The latest example of this problem is a new US Department of Labor rule aimed at reclassifying millions of “gig” workers—people who work in contract roles—as employees. The…
January 29, 2024
How Should Students Think About College?
In recent years, there has been a marked decline in public confidence in higher education, sparking debate on the value of a bachelor’s degree. In a new report published by AEI’s Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility, we seek to add some much-needed nuance to an increasingly go/no-go debate. Despite public perception, the bachelor’s degree continues to have great…