Policy paper originally published in Unleashing Prosperity with Stephen Moore.
Artificial intelligence is not simply another software tool or a narrow labor-saving technology. It is a general purpose technological breakthrough that can lower the cost of expertise, raise productivity, expand access to services, and increase real living standards. AI is already driving major economic activity by making the U.S. economy more productive and American industries more efficient as they compete with China, Japan, Europe and other developed nations.
Just as with the internet age and inventions like GPS, AI creates value by making access to expertise and the information much less expensive and more widely available. The claims that AI will destroy job opportunities is economically and historically unsound. Similar claims about every invention and technological breakthrough from the automobile to the farm tractor to the computer to automation sparked similar panics.
What AI will do, like those other technologies, is automate some (often drudgery) tasks, transform many jobs, and create a wide range of new opportunities. This will expand humankind’s ability to solve problems – from building affordable housing for all, to curing cancer and other killer diseases, to expanding the frontiers of space, to reducing wealth inequality – as services and extravagances that were once only available to the richest segments of society become routinely available to all.
The prophets of doom predicting mass unemployment will be wrong this time, just as they have been wrong before.
Read the full paper here.