Expert opinions on Economics

While estimates of the full impact of AI on the workforce differ widely, our base estimate indicates that automation could reduce labor demand by the equivalent of roughly 36 million jobs, while growth in the AI value chain and the broader economy co...

Do artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT eliminate jobs, create new ones, or both? There’s a lot of speculation regarding this question, but little solid data in the U.S. to answer it.

In our national survey, 83% of U.S. adults expect AI to eliminate more jobs than it creates.

There’s a common fear among people who work in Silicon Valley: snag one of the fast-growing, high-paying jobs in artificial intelligence, or get trapped in the “permanent underclass”, a phrase describing the fate of those who won’t have upward mobili...

Though a “permanent underclass” is not an imminent reality, in the near term AI could make some people richer and others worse off.

AI is expected to automate a large number of jobs. But when large numbers of people lose their means of earning a living, the situation cannot stay unbalanced forever. [...] History has repeatedly shown that societies do not stay in extreme imbalance...

With AI, although potential compensatory mechanisms such as new tasks and productivity gains are promised, history cautions us that such benefits are neither automatic nor equitably shared. [...] Prominent tax scholars have argued that a new, targete...

To date, BPC has not taken a position on whether AI should be taxed and does not endorse any particular option in this issue brief. [...] The code treats labor and capital differently: Employers owe payroll taxes on wages, while investments in equipm...

AI will most certainly change the labor market. But it has not yet changed the complementary relationship between workers and the tools that make them more productive. Taxing the machines is simply a softer version of the Luddite English textile work...

Well, I do have a fundamental belief that AI is surprising. [...] I think that the way that things will change and how what we do with our time evolves and we clearly will be in a world of abundance and how do we ensure that that abundance is broadly...

The promise of artificial general intelligence is that it will provide unprecedented productivity gains that could allow all of humanity to achieve a standard of living greater than that experienced by those in the wealthiest nations.

AGI is generally understood as an AI system that can match or exceed human capabilities on most economically valuable tasks. In such a world, the automation of work would not be limited to specific industries or routine jobs. Instead, machines would ...

AI isn’t going away. Barring unprecedented global government coordination, it isn’t even slowing down. The only real decision is whether to centralize power, or disperse it. Do you fear the technology? Or a small number of people controlling the te...

The “AGI-squashes-everyone” idea is unlikely, though not impossible. If American companies end up becoming dominant, my bet is that it will be because of the business ecosystems they build – not because they crossed a technological threshold that ren...

But each time humanity has come out with more people sharing greater prosperity, health, and freedom. We believe this will be true with AI as well, and the abundance of the future can be shared by everyone.

Eventually, we need some form of universal basic income for everybody while they work and once they retire.

Universal basic income is a policy prescription that those people calling for it tended to believe in years earlier, before they had even heard of AI, and now it fits this scenario. I do not know what the outcomes and therefore the mitigations of AI ...

They present themselves as benefactors, they turn recipients of universal basic income into passive beneficiaries of a system they do not control and, above all, they shift the focus: Instead of questioning the concentration of capital and power, we ...

Eventually, we need some form of universal basic income for everybody while they work and once they retire.

The answer to that fear is to make job loss less scary by building a new unemployment program.