Follow this authorEduardo Porter's opinions

Examples of this alternative abound. For instance, research by economists at Stanford University and MIT found that a generative AI conversational assistant substantially increased the productivity of customer support agents (measured in cases resolved per hour) and improved consumer satisfaction. The gains were greatest among the most novice workers.

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On the other end of the wage spectrum, computer programmers have also been found to benefit from AI help. In an experiment by researchers at Microsoft, GitHub and MIT, coders who used the AI tool GitHub Copilot completed programming tasks 56 percent faster.

It’s hard to understate how much human enhancement via AI tools could reshape society. The vast inequalities in income and opportunity that automation has given us so far could be significantly reduced.

Computers didn’t just automate routine, blue-collar work. By vastly expanding access to information, computers plugged into the internet empowered the expert white-collar workers who could profitably use it. Doctors, programmers, lawyers — broadly, workers with college degrees — reaped the rewards, leaving behind a host of less-educated workers whose jobs have progressively been taken over by the machines.

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AI could narrow the opportunity gap by helping lower-ranked workers take on decision-making tasks currently reserved for the dominant credentialed elites.

Consider how old-school IT tools such as electronic medical records have allowed nurse practitioners to make more complex decisions encroaching on doctors’ turf — much to the chagrin of the American Medical Association. Generative AI could take this further, allowing nurses and medical technicians to diagnose, prescribe courses of treatment and channel patients to specialized care.

As Autor put it, “AI, if used well, can assist with restoring the middle-skill, middle-class heart of the U.S. labor market that has been hollowed out by automation and globalization.”

Can the deployment of artificial intelligence be nudged in this direction? It would require a different approach to technology, both by policymakers and the corporate class. “The human-complementary approach is not likely to prevail based on current investments and corporate attitudes,” Acemoglu, Autor and Johnson say.

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Corporate managers today itch to........

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