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The debate surrounding artificial intelligence and its impact on the labor market has triggered a wave of proposals from politicians, tech executives, and economists. While history suggests technology revolutions ultimately create new career paths, the immediate anxiety stems from the potential for severe, localized job displacement.
The political and tech spheres have put forward five core concepts to address these concerns:
Tax the Robots: Spearheaded by economists like Daron Acemoglu and politicians like Senator Elizabeth Warren, this approach seeks to eliminate tax incentives that reward companies for replacing human labor with technology. Proposals include taxing AI data centers, implementing AI "token" usage taxes, or shifting the tax burden away from workers' paychecks and onto corporate AI beneficiaries.
Cushion the Blow: This strategy focuses on modernizing and expanding the existing unemployment insurance system. Proponents advocate for higher weekly payouts, extending benefits to part-time workers and recent graduates, and tracking AI-related job losses more precisely to target aid effectively.
Make Workers AI-Proof: A widely supported but challenging concept involving government- and corporate-funded job retraining. The goal is to prepare displaced workers for less vulnerable roles, though policy experts warn that the track record for large-scale retraining programs is historically spotty.
Spread the AI Riches: Visionaries and politicians—including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Senator Bernie Sanders, and Khan Academy founder Sal Khan—have proposed mechanisms like an "AI dividend," public equity stakes in AI giants, or voluntary corporate profit-pooling to provide direct financial payouts or retraining funds to the public.
Do Nothing (Wait and See): Skeptics and conservative economists argue that the threat to the workforce is highly speculative. They suggest relying on established backstops like standard unemployment insurance and Federal Reserve interventions rather than rushing into costly, unproven economic overhauls that could stifle innovation.
Most Americans fear that artificial intelligence will kill huge numbers of jobs — a view that’s echoed by some prominent AI executives and politicians.
Predictions of labor market doomsday are probably wrong, but the anxiety isn’t misplaced. History shows that technological revolutions typically create new careers, but some people lose out and never recover.
The uncertainty and fear are triggering a flood of ideas — some promising, some half-baked, and all difficult — to help Americans who may be hit by AI-related job losses.
While the more attention-grabbing proposals come from politicians and wonks on the political left, AI’s impact on work shows signs of becoming a hot-button topic as legislators of both parties face pressure to ensure that the benefits of the technology reach all Americans.
Here’s a guide to five emerging concepts to help people prepare as AI sweeps through the job market.
Tax the robots
The idea: Collect more taxes from companies, AI giants, or rich people — or all of them.
Pros: Supporters say higher taxes or new tolls on corporate AI usage could pay for public benefits or discourage corporations from ditching workers for AI.
Cons: Raising taxes is always a political fight. Some tax experts warn that tax overhauls could hurt the economy and the labor market.
Details: Many supporters of this concept have seized on research by Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu and his collaborators, who found that the U.S. tax system rewards companies for replacing workers with technology.
They want to end the incentives for automation, essentially by raising taxes on companies and some wealthy people. Acemoglu believes that will make businesses more likely to keep and retrain their workers, while encouraging the development of AI that complements rather than replaces people.
Suggestions for AI “token” taxes, which effectively charge companies for increased AI usage, are hot among Democratic politicians, including Tom Steyer, a candidate for California governor.
Some executives and companies, including start-up investor Vinod Khosla and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, have also suggested AI usage taxes or other tax increases for wealthy people and corporations.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), who has long pushed for higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations, says a new tax on AI data centers and heftier corporate taxes could help fund unemployment payments, expanded health insurance, and other benefits.
Others, including Khosla, have suggested that taxing the beneficiaries of AI could allow lower taxes on workers’ paychecks.
Cushion the blow
The idea: Shore up and increase unemployment payments and job assistance to give people extra time and support to transition to more promising occupations. Supporters say this will be urgent if people need to change careers multiple times in an AI age.
Pros: Supporters say that the century-old unemployment insurance system is rickety but that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel to help AI-displaced workers.
Cons: It would be hard to pay for or win significant Republican backing for expanding government benefit programs. Detractors don’t want to throw more money at the unemployment insurance system, which displayed massive flaws during the coronavirus-triggered unemployment spike in 2020.
Details: Rebecca Dixon, CEO of the National Employment Law Project, a worker advocacy group, said unemployment benefits are too stingy, particularly if AI-related job losses land hardest on white-collar workers. Today, maximum weekly payments range from $235 in Mississippi to $1,105 in Massachusetts. She also wants to see such benefits include part-time workers, recent grads, and others who are often ineligible for unemployment benefits.
Modernizing state unemployment programs and improving data collection — such as tracking job titles and hours worked — could also help pinpoint which occupations are picking up steam from AI, said Will Raderman, senior policy adviser at the Searchlight Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
Legislation spearheaded by Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) and Mark R. Warner (D-Virginia) proposes government-overseen data collection on the number of AI-related job losses and which occupations are hardest hit.
Make workers AI-proof
The idea: Government- or corporate-funded job training programs can prepare people for more fruitful careers. Some proponents also want temporary government subsidies for workers who initially take a pay cut to shift to occupations considered less vulnerable to AI dislocation.
Pros: Worker training is on nearly every policy wish list for a future AI economy. It’s uncontroversial in principle, and some existing training programs, such as those at community colleges, are more effective than others, said Martha Gimbel, executive director of the Budget Lab, a policy research organization at Yale University.
Cons: Job training could mean anything from a short AI skills course to expensive reeducation. Training programs also have a spotty track record. “People who are talking about training often do not fully understand how much we know or do not know about what training is successful,” Gimbel said.
Details: Gina Raimondo, who served as commerce secretary in the Biden administration, has said that an AI workforce requires “a new grand bargain between government and business.”
In a recent TED Talk, she held up the example of the Biden administration’s collaboration with AI computer chip manufacturer TSMC to help train workers for roles that it needed for a massive Arizona factory.
Spread the AI riches
The idea: Provide people a guaranteed income, public ownership in AI companies, or something else of value, untethered to employment.
Pros: Supporters say using AI as a piggy bank for Americans is a fruitful way to widely spread benefits of the technology.
Cons: These concepts are untested, and they don’t tackle AI-related job losses.
Details: Alex Bores, a Democratic candidate for a House seat in New York, has won attention and deep-pocketed detractors for his AI proposals, which include an “AI dividend.”
If AI companies prove wildly successful, his proposal would give the public stock in them. If workers lose out from the spread of AI, Bores’s plan would trigger direct payments or other benefits to all Americans.
On Monday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) said he’s working on a bill that would give the U.S. government a stake in AI companies and use that to send a payout to all Americans.
Bores said in an interview that an OpenAI policy blueprint released in April has some ideas conceptually similar to his own. He said that shows a brewing consensus to restrain AI. “The document from OpenAI shows how much the conversation has moved,” Bores said.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman outlined years ago tax code overhauls and other policy changes that could be needed as AI sweeps through workforces.
Sal Khan, founder of the online education firm Khan Academy, proposes a different way to spread the AI wealth: Businesses that replace workers with AI should voluntarily allocate 1 percent of their profits for worker retraining.
Khan doesn’t see this as charity but as a way for businesses to focus their worker training efforts and avoid ugly outcomes. If white-collar unemployment spikes, Khan said in an interview, “the politics of that are not going to be good.”
Do nothing
The idea: No one knows the ultimate scale of future AI-related job losses or which occupations could shrink or expand, so it’s better to wait and see.
Pros: Supporters say rushing to make expensive overhauls to government or corporate policies risks doing more harm than good.
Cons: Some economists and politicians say that even relatively small job loss numbers can have profound economic and social ripple effects. The United States must lay the groundwork now to tackle AI-triggered joblessness before it happens, they say.
Details: Stan Veuger, an economist with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, said that established government backstops — unemployment insurance and the Federal Reserve’s interest rate system — will be more reliable than unproven interventions if AI whacks jobs.
“There’s no point in trying to revamp our entire welfare state based on pure speculation,” Veuger said.
The Trump administration and some of its allies have said the risk of AI-related job losses is wildly overstated. Most other Republican elected officials are also unlikely to support policy efforts that critics say would slow AI development.