At the heart of the AI is a fear that it could become the first technology in human history to lead to fewer jobs for workers and permanently higher unemployment.
The reason this would be so devastating goes beyond simply its financial impact on families. The harm from a dramatic AI-induced increase in mass unemployment would not be cured simply with Universal Basic Income, a policy that shares the gains of AI by simply cutting equal checks to ensure basic sustenance for all. Such an approach fails to address the dignity and fulfillment humans achieve through work and contribution and the need to target such efforts to create a better society.
If an apocalyptic AI job-loss scenario comes true, we do not need to give up on the fundamental goal of building a full-employment economy that centers on work and the purpose it can bring. A far better path is to offset AI-induced job loss with the elevation and expansion of millions of desperately-needed jobs which provide dignified care, preventative health services, educational opportunities, counseling for those with mental health and addiction issues, and navigation services for individuals facing barriers to work due to disability, past incarceration, or long-term unemployment.
In other words, our response to the AI revolution must be to support what I call “double-dignity jobs,” in which human workers receive the dignified compensation they deserve in exchange for caring and providing dignity to other humans.
Double-dignity jobs primarily involve essential human-touch tasks, making them unlikely to be replaced by AI. For instance, research conducted by Anthropic found that health care support and personal care support jobs have some of the lowest risks of automation. MIT’s David Autor has similarly found that these types of care jobs are hard to automate because they involve non-routine, interpersonal, and dexterous tasks. Intuition confirms this analysis. Will most Americans want AI-power
