Jason Furman
I have no idea what the future of work will look like.
Will generative AI replace jobs? Complement jobs? Exacerbate inequality through skill-biased
technological change? Reduce inequality by competing with higher-skilled workers but not middle-skill
workers?
No economist, AI engineer, or policymaker knows the answers to these questions either. Economic
research holds out the hope, albeit often not realized, of coming up with a clear and widely agreed
understanding of the past, as EIG’s American Worker Project has aimed to do. But definitive guidance on the future is too much to hope for.
Undaunted by this existential challenge, discussions about the “future of work” took off in 2009, as shown
in Figure 1—paradoxical timing given that the biggest problem of that moment was the unnecessary
absence of jobs for millions of workers who were unemployed for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with the future of work. The problem back then was instead the failure of policymakers to learn,
sufficiently, a critical lesson from the macroeconomic past: the need for adequate demand.
Πηγή: eig.org