June 1, 2023
Will Chat Tech Help the Neuro-Divergent Find Their Place in Society?
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
An Unexpected Role for AI in the Workplace
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
Stop the AI Pause
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…
March 31, 2023
AI and the Future of Work: Preparing the Workforce for an AI-Driven Economy
AI is best positioned to augment the workforce, not replace it. The U.S. Chamber’s Commission on Artificial Intelligence Competition, Inclusion, and Innovation report outlines recommendations for preparing the workforce for the continued integration of AI tools across our economy. To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the “end of work” have been greatly exaggerated – more…
March 27, 2023
Here Are the Kinds of Jobs Chat AI Is Likeliest to Affect
A new analysis estimates that a fifth of all U.S. jobs are in the category most vulnerable to disruption. Researchers at OpenAI—the company behind ChatGPT—and the University of Pennsylvania came out last week with a first look at the potential labor market impact of chat technology. If these initial “guesstimates” hold up, we might be looking at…
March 15, 2023
Can Businesses Boost Upward Mobility?
Event Summary On March 15, AEI and the Brookings Institution convened a panel of labor economists and experts to discuss the role businesses play in advancing upward mobility for workers. AEI’s Brent Orrell moderated the discussion among the panelists. Harry Holzer of Georgetown University spoke first about the economics of good and bad jobs and…
March 6, 2023
The Federal AI Shambles
The future is fast arriving—as the last year’s developments in artificial intelligence make clear—but the national government is nowhere near ready. Over the last year, we’ve seen the explosion into the public consciousness of major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence in the form of new tools that were immediately widely available. First came the release of…
March 2, 2023
The Lost World of Ecumenical Republicanism
As improbable as it may sound, one of the more interesting books on the market right now is a policy memoir largely about the rise and fall of Richard Nixon’s welfare policy. For a few wonks, scribblers, and geeks, that policy history is quite valuable as a reminder of how it’s all been said before…
February 28, 2023
Workforce Futures Initiative: How Well Does the American Workforce System Work?
Event Summary On February 28, AEI’s Brent Orrell hosted an event commemorating the launch of the Workforce Futures Initiative (WFI) website. WFI has been an ongoing research effort among the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, and the Harvard Kennedy School Malcom Weiner Center for Social Policy. The panelists of this event were the steering…
February 23, 2023
Heeding the Warning from the Future
It’s fun to laugh at flat earth theory and similar conspiracist nonsense. It’s less fun to consider the implications of the movement’s resurgence. In case you weren’t aware, America is in the midst of a dramatic, internet-driven resurgence of the fanatical belief that our beautiful, oblate spheroid is in reality a flat plane whose edges…