Start preparing for the economic impact of Artificial Intelligence
The hype around artificial intelligence (AI) is reaching fever pitch. Key questions explore how it might impact our lives and employment over the next five to 10 years. These lead to questions over how to fund tax revenue shortfalls and higher unemployment costs.
In practice, it’s too early to know how fast AI will advance, how far it will spread into society, whether it will reach a state of superintelligence where it outsmarts humans at everything, or the net employment impact.
This column explores the key economic questions that arise around the potential impact of AI on jobs in society. I will focus on robot taxes as a way of funding higher unemployment benefit costs or Guaranteed/Universal Basic Income (UBI) and Universal Basic Services (UBS) schemes. I will then go on to explore four scenarios of how things might play out, and the supporting policy options in each case.
Our recent book Beyond Genuine Stupidity – Ensuring AI Serves Humanity (co-authored with Steve Wells, Alexandra Whittington, April Koury, and Maria Romero), highlights why these unknowns are not a good reason to adopt a ‘wait and see’ posture. The technology is advancing exponentially, and what seemed years away last week is suddenly a new breakthrough announced today. Hence, if we wait until the true impacts manifest themselves across society, that could cause potentially epic economic and social crises. We argue there is nothing to be gained from waiting, and that we must start exploring these scenarios and experimenting with policy options to help navigate the emerging future more proactively.