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July 27, 2023
The overall employment situation looks great in the United States—so why are so many men not working? The Wall Street Journal reports that work among prime-age Americans—those between 25 and 54 years of age—is at the highest rate in two decades, driven by rising wages and worker shortages. After years of decline in labor force participation, this is certainly welcome…
July 27, 2023
So-called ‘soft skills’ are in short supply in the workforce and society at large. AI could help us get better A few weeks ago, McKinsey & Company published updated estimates on when key anticipated characteristics of artificial intelligence might arrive — including things like creativity, logical reasoning, and social/emotional reasoning, sensing and output. McKinsey’s timeline for increased capacity across a range of such capabilities…
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 22, 2023
Event Summary On June 22, AEI’s Brent Orrell and Shane Tews were joined by Rob Reich of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and Jeremy M. Weinstein of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies to discuss System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot (Harper Academic, 2021), a book…
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 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…
May 23, 2023
WHEN MICHAEL POLANYI, the underappreciated twentieth-century physicist, philosopher, and economist, is remembered nowadays, it is most often for having observed that much of human knowledge, in both practical and abstract matters, is “tacit” rather than explicit. Most of what we know is not written or verbalized anywhere, yet it nonetheless exists as a foundation for our consciously…
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…