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August 15, 2023
2023 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for artificial intelligence, with the rise of generative AI poised to transform industries and reshape workforces. The latest McKinsey Global Survey on AI confirms the increasing market penetration of tools like DALL-E and ChatGPT and outlines how workers and employers see the technology affecting work patterns in the…
August 9, 2023
The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has ignited fears about its potential to disrupt the labor market. There has been no shortage of predictions of huge impacts AI will have on the future of work—especially for workers with higher levels of education—fueling both anxiety and the risk of overzealous regulation. A recent report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development…
July 28, 2023
Over the past two years, I have had the honor and privilege of steering AEI’s Workforce Future’s Initiative in collaboration with colleagues at The Brookings Institution and The Harvard Kennedy School’s Project on Workforce. Together, we’ve convened experts to evaluate evidence of workforce program success, discuss workforce policy, and identify priorities for new research on the future…
July 14, 2023
It is hard at times to tell which is likely to be more disruptive: artificial intelligence (AI) or the multiplying efforts to regulate this powerful, potentially transformational, and highly beneficial technology. With multiple calls for pauses and increasing calls for new regulation, we are clearly at a critical moment in a debate that could either…
June 13, 2023
Gender gaps are one of the defining characteristics of our age. In a wide variety of educational, social, and work settings, women increasingly out-perform men. Women attend college at higher rates and appear to be succeeding in a work environment where so-called “soft-skills” predominate. There’s one area, however, where men are stepping out ahead of women: the adoption and…
June 7, 2023
Just as I was preparing an article titled “Calm Down About Artificial Intelligence”—one in a series—Marc Andreesen has preempted me with an 18-page blog post inventorying the main threads in the “AI doom-loop” and why these concerns are either wrong or substantially overblown. In fairness, Andreesen is open to the criticism that he is engaging in…
June 1, 2023
The lament that digital technologies and social media are contributing to an epidemic of loneliness and conflict is ubiquitous. Whether these technologies caused or exacerbated these challenges is hard to unpack. My view is America’s sociability crisis was already advanced before Facebook, Twitter and other technology companies figured out how to monetize loneliness by providing…
April 6, 2023
Last week, the Future of Life Institute released an open letter that included some computer science luminaries calling to freeze deployment and research on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for six months. One prominent AI ethicist insisted that the letter did not go far enough and proposed that the world’s governments prepare for “airstrikes” against rogue developers and data processing…
January 24, 2023
A recurring theme of the Workforce Futures Initiative has been how little we know about the evolving needs of workers and businesses or even how the nation’s spatially and numerically vast labor market actually operates. This is especially true when we consider the “gig” or contract worker economy, which has grown dramatically in the past…