July 16, 2023
When Office Perks Become Perils
If you want to understand the downside of seeing your work as a “calling,” just look at zookeepers. In his book, The Good Enough Job, Simone Stolzoff writes: “It’s a job where the money is short and the hours are long. The majority of zookeepers have college degrees but the annual salary is less than $40,000…
July 14, 2023
Do We Need a Reboot? Challenging Prevailing Narratives on AI
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
System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
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
Is There an AI Gender Gap?
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
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…