Silicon Valley has expressed its views on the generative AI promises to build new career paths and economic opportunities, like the newly coveted solo unicorn startup. Banks and analysts are promoting the possibility of boosting AI’s GDP. However, these benefits are unlikely to be distributed equally in the face of what many expect to be AI-related job losses.
Amid this background, humanity launched its economic futures program on Friday. This is a new initiative to support research into the impact of AI on the labor market and the global economy, and to develop policy proposals to prepare for shifts.
“Everyone is asking questions about the economic impact [of AI]Sarah Heck, head of human policy programs and partnerships, told TechCrunch. [happen]. ”
At least one well-known name shares his views on the potential economic impacts of AI: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. In May, Amodei predicted that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and raise the unemployment rate to 20% over the next 1-5 years.
When asked whether one of the key goals of human economic futures programmes was to study ways to alleviate AI-related unemployment, Heck was cautious.
“I think the key goal is to understand what’s actually going on,” she said. “If there’s unemployment, we need to convene a group of thinkers to talk about mitigation. If there’s a huge GDP expansion, that’s great. We need to convene policymakers to figure out what to do with that. I don’t think this will be a monolith.”
The program is built on existing economic indexes for humanity that launched in February, and analyzes the effects of AI on the labour market and the economy for open-source, aggregated, anonymized data.
The program will focus on three main areas: Grants will be provided to researchers investigating the impact of AI on labor, productivity, and value creation. Create a forum for developing and evaluating policy proposals to prepare for the economic impact of AI. Build a dataset to track the economic use and impact of AI.
Humanity has started the program with several action items.
The company has launched applications for rapid grants of up to $50,000 for “empirical studies on the economic impact of AI,” and evidence-based policy proposals for artificial host symposium events in Washington, DC and Europe in the fall. Humanity also seeks partnerships with independent research institutions, providing partners with Claude API credits and other resources to support their research.
Regarding grants, Heck pointed out that humanity is looking for individuals, academics, or teams who can come up with high-quality data in a short period of time.
“We want to complete it within six months,” she said. “There’s no need to peer review.”
For the symposium, Heck said humanity wants policy ideas from a variety of backgrounds and intellectual perspectives. She said policy proposals go “beyond labor.”
“We want to understand more about the transition,” she said. “How do workflows happen in new ways? How are new jobs created that no one has ever thought of before?
Heck said he also hopes that humanity will study the effects of AI on fiscal policy. For example, what happens when there is a major change in the way companies see value creation?
“We want to open the opening here for things that we can really study,” Heck said. “It’s true that labor is one of them, but it’s a much wider strip.”
Openai, a rival of humanity, released its own economic blueprint in January. It focuses on establishing an “AI Economic Zone” that will help the public adopt AI tools, build robust AI infrastructure, and streamline regulations that drive investment. Openai’s Stargate project, which will build data centers across the US in partnership with Oracle and SoftBank, will generate thousands of construction jobs, but Openai will not directly address AI-related unemployment with its economic blueprint.
However, Openai’s blueprint outlines an overview that allows governments to play a role in supply chain training pipelines, investing in AI literacy, supporting local training programs, and expanding access to public universities to promote the local AI literate workforce.
Human economic impact programs are part of a slow, growing change between some tech companies, whether it be reputational concerns, authentic altruism, or a combination of both, to position themselves as part of the solutions that help them create. On Thursday, for example, ride company Lyft launched a forum to gather input from human drivers as they began integrating Robotaxis into the platform.
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