San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
THE EVOLUTION OF THOUGHT
From the classroom to the boardroom, artificial intelligence is raising questions about how it can advance humanity — and how it might destroy it. Essays today through Tuesday will explore applications of AI from art to education to therapy.
AI CAN ENHANCE OR UNDERMINE OUR HUMANITY
Artificial intelligence is transforming the world we live in, from art to autonomous vehicles to personalized health care. While these advancements are exciting, they also raise questions about the impact of AI on our livelihoods. Will it eliminate jobs en masse, leaving millions of workers unemployed, or will it create new, more rewarding jobs that enhance our quality of life?
While researchers continue to debate this question, what is clear is that there will be significant job displacement. Everyone in the United States won’t end up jobless overnight, but a scenario where 100 million people are employed instead of the current 165 million is plausible. The trend of AI automating entire industries will become the norm as time goes on, whether it’s writers, software developers or truck drivers — and I believe that unless there are significant national and local policy changes, we will see unnecessary social and economic suffering in our region. What can we do now?
A landmark Mckinsey study from 2017 estimated that future advances in AI would destroy a third of current American jobs but over time would become a net job creator, as more industries need workers to help manage the technology. This dynamic could easily play out in San Diego. According to a 2023 report from the San Diego Regional
Economic Development Corp., San Diego County currently has only half the talent pool needed to meet the demand for AI skills across our economy. In this scenario, as time goes on, our local governments will need to simultaneously keep displaced workers afloat while adding to their skills and training them for emerging jobs.
There are two things our local, state and federal government leaders can do now to prepare workers for the Ai-driven changes that await us: Increase supportive services for displaced workers and build back workforce training and development programs.
When someone loses a job, the toll is not just financial. Job loss has major impacts on a person’s psychological and physical well-being and sense of purpose, and often brings major family disruption. However, if governments collect enough corporate tax revenue from the companies whom AI outsourcing benefits, they can reallocate some of these economic gains to workers by expanding universal basic income policies, which guarantee a certain income paid to every family.
While there haven’t been any longterm, large-scale studies on universal basic income in our country, hundreds of smaller studies conducted since the 1970s show that the policy has great promise. There is evidence that universal basic income reduces poverty more effectively than the current welfare system, improves recipients’ mental health and could even increase the United States real gross domestic product. The federal government’s COVID-19
pandemic stimulus payments and child tax credits for families nationwide were a form of universal basic income, and they reduced child poverty by over 40 percent.
Additionally, the nation needs to properly fund public workforce development and job training programs. According to the National Skills Coalition, federal funding for workforce development initiatives has shrunk by two-thirds over the last four decades while the labor force has grown by 50 percent. The United States currently spends a fraction of what other organizations for economic cooperation and development nations spend on workforce development. Private employers are the ones currently funding most of these programs, which are only accessible to their own employees.
But one example of a successful public initiative in action is the San Diego Workforce Partnership Rapid Response program. During recent layoffs at Qualcomm, this program helped a large number of laidoff workers quickly reskill, update their resumes and find new jobs locally. University systems, including UC San Diego Division of Extended Studies, are already actively working to make workforce development and job training more accessible — and they need to regularly look for ways to partner and expand public programs like this. Meanwhile, at UC San Diego Division of Extended Studies, we are constantly developing new degree courses that better equip the emerging workforce to meet future job market demands, such as our rapidly growing data science program through the Halicioglu Data Science Institute.
The cost of automating jobs will be both human and economic, but short-term investments in social support and workforce development offer a bridge. Providing universal basic income and making job training more easily available may also have the added benefit of giving many people the freedom to explore creative, socially valuable work that is not easily automated while having fulfilling personal lives.
We have an economic and moral responsibility to ensure AI’S adoption will benefit all members of society, not just those at the top. Our humanness is defined in part by the work we do, but perhaps even more importantly, by how we care for and treat those who have been displaced by AI. We are at a critical moment in history, and we must take united action to ensure that AI enhances, rather than undermines, our humanity.