Missing AI Leadership on Labor Policy

Betsy Masiello is a founding partner of Proteus Strategies, a boutique tech policy strategy and advocacy firm.  Shutterstock There are a number of storms brewing for AI companies, whose public policy profiles have gone from zero to sixty faster than any tech companies that came before. Copyright lawsuits have piled up, privacy regulators are having a look, legislators and regulators are actively drafting new rules around the world, and of course the existential safety debate continues to rage.  But a slower-motion storm is brewing: the likelihood that an increasingly animated US labor movement will come for AI.  Disruption to Labor Markets is Coming The economic impacts of AI, while likely to be vast, are impossible to predict with certainty. Much of the existing research has focused on analyzing and predicting how many jobs AI might take, and which ones. Major management consulting shops and investment banks have written reports, as have economic policy think tanks and academics. VCs are penning thought-leadership pieces hailing a new era of startup scaling, where fewer people than ever are needed to run a business. And among the AI leaders, OpenAI deserves credit for releasing its own analysis of this question.  My goal is not to rehash any of these reports, so instead I offer a very simplified TL&DR:  (1) Roughly 30% of today’s jobs involve a significant number of tasks that AI could do, with greater impacts felt in traditional “white collar” and higher-income jobs;  (2) These impacts may not result in 1:1 job…Missing AI Leadership on Labor Policy