Is Government Intervention the Solution to the Great AI Replacement?

Most careers today have some possibility of being diminished or replaced by artificial intelligence. This has sparked great fears among many citizens and academics that most people will end up without a job and business elites will keep getting richer. They believe that there will be a vast structural surge of unemployment in which the jobs that many people had for years are no longer needed with no other jobs for people to turn to. However, just like in the Industrial Revolution or other technological shifts through time, the advance of artificial intelligence will actually only cause a temporary change in employment, which can be swiftly changed through reskilling.

The first problem with the AI alarmist mentality is the weak underlying economic theory. MIT economist David Autor breaks the problem down as either removing nonexpert or expert tasks. The removal of nonexpert tasks from expert work allows experts to get more done and command more wages. However, removing expert tasks allows nonexperts to undertake jobs that once only experts could do, which has an ambiguous effect on their salary. Regardless of whether it is tearing down a barrier to skilled work or enabling skilled workers to be more effective, the final result will always be a more effective worker. While workers in the past who had a unique advantage for doing a specific type of work do not have that same advantage anymore, the potential of each worker to produce is much higher. Some workers will have to gain new skills, but the opened career paths for workers who were previously limited more than makes up for that in overall welfare. Some specific jobs will be lost but the potential for new businesses to do more with less labor will allow for the creation of more overall jobs. The advent of AI in business settings is not to be feared, but is instead a tool that will allow each worker to do more.  

Even with inflation eroding the purchasing power of the dollar, the technological advances of the last hundred years have made almost everything imaginable cheaper. While the overall societal benefits of that technological development can be debated, the main thing that governing bodies use to judge welfare, which is affordability for daily items, has consistently gotten better. The ability of AI to replace a large amount of a worker’s current job will have a far greater effect on the prices of things those workers need than on employment overall. There will always be jobs for people in a free market, and a higher level of technology simply means those jobs will put people towards different uses than they had in a world with less technology. Historically there was always a transition followed by a higher level of material flourishing than ever before. There is no reason that this time will be any different unless the government interferes and tries to hold on to archaic industries or to protect big businesses through aggressive regulation. The AI transition can be over and done with quickly or drawn out for years, depending on how much intervention the government wants to use. Whether in the Great Depression or the Industrial Revolution the transition was dragged on rather than helped by government intervention.

While it can be appealing to try to freeze jobs in place, it is ultimately doing a disservice to them and everyone else in the country to hold employers back from using cost saving technology. It is almost insulting to workers to force them to work a job in which they are not truly needed. More jobs will always be created as long as human wants are limitless and commerce is given a stable and somewhat free regulatory environment. Ultimately, the desire to keep workers in their current jobs is admirable, yet completely impractical. If a business is forced to keep its current workers and not adapt, that entire business will be outcompeted by people from a different country with fewer regulations. Jobs are important, but successful businesses are a miracle. Holding on to specific jobs has the potential to greatly harm businesses, but allowing businesses to flourish will almost always create more jobs. While AI may seem frightening, the best thing the government can do is let the rearrangement run its course and not use regulation to pick winners. Creating stringent AI use regulations will only benefit the largest businesses with the funds and legal support needed to ensure they are fulfilling the hyper specific federal regulations. Freedom and time will let the optimal outcome for workers and businesses arise. 

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