Jack Dorsey shouldn’t scare people: Every employer needn’t deploy AI to lay human workers off

The fear that artificial intelligence will lead to mass layoffs is spreading. Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of the financial technology firm Block, laid off nearly half of its workforce last week. Citing AI’s labour-saving capabilities, he predicted other companies would soon follow suit: “Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes.”As an economist, I disagree with Dorsey’s prediction.

Block is not representative of the tens of millions of US businesses, and the choice Dorsey made was not the only option. In conversations about AI, it’s important to focus less on dystopian scenarios and more on ways to bring about an AI future that fosters shared prosperity. Widespread automation—replacing human workers and devaluing human expertise, as Dorsey predicts—is only one possible outcome of AI.

Another path is “pro-worker AI,” a phrase coined by a team of MIT economists, that enhances the value of existing human expertise and creates new tasks. Unlike AI automation, pro-worker AI that raises a worker’s productivity can increase wages and expand employment into new areas.An existing example they give is a food delivery app in China that added a voice chatbot to support hearing-impaired delivery workers, significantly improving their performance. A speculative example is an AI assistant that allows aircraft maintenance workers to become spaceflight maintenance workers.

It may be easier to imagine the jobs that AI will destroy than the ones it will create, but job creation is common with many technologies. In fact, about 60% of jobs in 2018 were in occupational specialties that did not exist in 1940. Whether AI is pro-worker is not principally about