Photo By Eugene Mymrim/Getty Images
New studies demonstrate what should be obvious: Universal basic income programs kill initiative.
All the confident conjecture aside, no one really knows how the revolution in artificial intelligence will play out in the coming decades. Is AI more transformative than the internet? Is it more dangerous than nuclear weapons? Is all of this just ignorance-fueled hype? Depends on who you ask.
The economy has evolved over the past 200 years from agrarian to industrial to service-based. Automation in general has increased productivity, and technological advances have made workers more efficient and societies much wealthier. Weavers and bank tellers feared for their livelihoods at the time, but the Industrial Revolution led to significantly more hiring in the textile sector, and banks increased employment after ATMs were introduced. We’re still waiting for the 15-hour workweek and for people to start retiring by 40 thanks to the proliferation of computers, as some predicted in the 1970s.
The rise of AI has initiated the latest round of anxiety that workers might be supplanted by machines. Dario Amodei, a co-founder of the AI company Anthropic, said last year that advances in artificial intelligence have the potential to replace up to half of the entry-level white-collar workforce and lift the unemployment rate as high as 20% within five years. “Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced—and 20% of people don’t have jobs,” he told Axios.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)
______________________
Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
