Third Way offers game plan for AI job disruption

Third Way offers game plan for AI job disruption

The center-left think tank Third Way is laying out a roadmap for how Washington can respond to potential job disruption from AI in the face of wide-ranging predictions about the technology’s impact.

AI leaders have offered dramatically different takes on what the technology means for the future of work.

While Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned last year that AI could wipe out up to half of entry-level white-collar jobs, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman argued last week that “jobs doomerism is likely long-term wrong.”“In other words: no one really knows,” Third Way wrote in a memo shared first with The Hill on Thursday. “But history offers a guide,” it continued. “When transformative technologies arrive—whether electricity, computers, or the internet—the biggest economic challenge is not permanent job loss. It is disruption.”

The think tank argued that the U.S. needs to update its education and workforce systems for the AI era, bringing AI literacy to schools and making apprenticeships more common. Third Way also called for updating the nation’s “leaky safety net” by upgrading unemployment insurance and establishing federal wage insurance — temporary payments for workers who have to take lower paying jobs as a result of AI displacement. “Even world-class education and training cannot prevent the downsides of disruption,” the memo added. “Millions of workers could still face layoffs as industries reorganize around AI, but America’s safety net was not designed for this kind of rapid technological change. It must be modernized.”

To finance these policies, the think tank argued for tax changes that would ensure that “those at the very top who stand to get exorbitantly rich off the technology pay for it.”It suggested that investment income be taxed more like........

© The Hill