AI Could Actually Help Rebuild The Middle Class

Summary

Summarized wtih ChatGPT

AI has the potential to extend expertise to a larger set of workers and reshape the value and nature of human expertise. Rather than destroying jobs, AI can assist with restoring the middle-skill, middle-class heart of the labor market that has been hollowed out by automation and globalization. By shortening the distance from intention to result, AI tools enable workers with proper training and judgment to accomplish tasks that were previously time-consuming, failure-prone or infeasible. AI can enable a larger set of workers possessing complementary knowledge to perform some of the higher-stakes decision-making tasks currently reserved for elite experts.

Highlights from Article

Replicating our existing capabilities, simply at greater speed and lower cost, is a minor achievement. The most valuable tools complement human capabilities and open new frontiers of possibility. The most pedestrian ones incrementally outperform existing tools. My Maytag washing machine harnesses more computer processing power than the first Apollo mission so that I can start its spin cycle from anywhere on the planet. But that washing machine is never going to reach the moon. If AGI simply gives humanity a better washing machine rather than a new moonshot, AGI has not failed us, we have failed ourselves. Amid a deluge of press reports on the impending AI robocalypse, one could easily fail to notice that the industrialized world is long on jobs and short on workers. The question is not whether we will have jobs — we will — but whether these will be the jobs we want.

The unique opportunity that AI offers humanity is to turn back this tide — to extend the relevance, reach and value of human expertise for a larger set of workers. Not only could this dampen earnings inequality and lower the costs of key services like healthcare and education, but it could also help restore the quality, stature and agency that has been lost to too many workers and jobs.

For the lucky among us, work provides purpose, community and veneration. But the quality, dignity and respect of a substantial minority of jobs has eroded over the past four decades as computerization has marched onward and inequality has grown more prevalent.

• AI can create more roles.

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