Artificial intelligence is an innovation that must be pursued, President Obama’s top economic adviser said Thursday, but greater automation of work could increase income inequality and push some people out of the workforce if the right policies are not implemented.
Speaking at New York University, Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Jason Furman said he rejected very pessimistic or highly optimistic views of the effects that automization will have on work, saying that labor markets can adjust to technology making certain work obsolete. But those same changes, he said, have also resulted in extra inequality in the past, and that dynamic could play out again.
“The traditional argument that we do not need to worry about the robots taking our jobs still leaves us with the worry that the only reason we will still have our jobs is because we are willing to do them for lower wages,” he said, according to prepared remarks.
Furman cited the example of grocery store cashiers being replaced by kiosks to illustrate how low-skilled jobs could see downward pressure on their earnings with more automation.
Furman also argued that robots would eliminate work, citing the fact that over time about 95 percent of people who have wanted work are able to find it, even though very few of the jobs that existed, for instance, in the 1700s that are still around today. Nevertheless, he warned that the introduction of robots could push down on employment and labor force participation in the short term as workers find themselves losing jobs and searching for new ones.
“AI has the potential — just like other innovations we have seen in past decades — to contribute to further erosion in both the labor force participation rate and the employment rate,” he warned.
Institutions and policies, however, can counteract those pressures, Furman argued.
One possibility, however, that he rejected is that of instituting a universal basic income — that is, guaranteeing every adult a small amount of money, paid by the government, to ensure that no one is impoverished and to allow people to pursue lines of work that might not pay much.
Universal basic income is an idea that has supporters among academics and thinkers on the right and left, especially in Silicon Valley. Furman opposes it on the grounds that it represents giving up on the idea that people can adjust to new labor markets. Instead, he proposed, more should be done to advance education, job training, and job search assistance.
