Office Hours: How Do We Deal With the Inevitable Loss of Good Jobs to AI?

Friends,

Anthropic — the artificial intelligence company behind the chatbot Claude —confidentially filed yesterday for an initial public offering. Soon, SpaceX and OpenAI will be doing the same. The three I.P.O.s could mark a once-in-a-generation creation of giant AI firms, and huge money for a relative handful of people (including the world’s first trillionaire, Elon Musk).

But this giant AI wave is also likely to spell the end of a huge number of jobs. AI will also create some new jobs but the AI tsunami is coming so quickly that, unlike in previous technological waves, most workers won’t have much chance to adapt.

Not only will AI destroy jobs, but workers will have even less bargaining leverage than they now have, which means that to stay employed (or land a job) they’ll have to settle for lower wages.

Put this together with (as I pointed out Sunday) languishing returns to labor and soaring returns to capital even before the AI tsunami hits, and AI is sure to shift the balance of economic power even further from labor to capital — making wages an even less reliable mechanism for distributing prosperity. We’re heading for a major shakeup of our entire political economic system — and it’s coming soon.

So what should be done?

Herewith, four ideas that are being actively discussed — in schools of public policy, in legislative cloakrooms, and among the billionaire class. I’m going to set each of them out as clearly as I can, along with their downsides, and ask you to weigh in...