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We Need to Invest in the Dignity of Work for the AI Era
At the core of public anxiety about artificial intelligence is the fear that it could become the first technology in history to deliver sustained net job loss and permanently higher unemployment.
The harm of such a scenario would extend far beyond lost income. It could not be fully solved by Universal Basic Income alone. While UBI would share AI’s gains by providing basic financial security, it would fail to address the deeper human need for purpose, contribution, and dignity that meaningful work provides.
We do not need to abandon the goal of a full-employment economy centered on work. Instead, we should respond to potential AI-driven displacement by elevating and expanding millions of high-value jobs that deliver dignity both to the worker and to those they serve. I call these **“double-dignity jobs.”**
The Resilience of Human-Touch Work
These roles center on essential human connection — care work, preventative health services, education, mental health counseling, addiction support, and navigation services for people facing barriers such as disabilities, past incarceration, or long-term unemployment. They are among the most resistant to automation.
Research from Anthropic and MIT economist David Autor confirms that health care support, personal care, and similar roles involve non-routine, interpersonal, and dexterous tasks that AI and robots will struggle to fully replace. Intuition supports this: most families would not want an AI robot bathing, comforting, or caring for a parent with dementia. Parents want their children to learn and socialize with other children and caring adults. Teens in crisis need human counselors, not just chatbots.
The Current Crisis of Undervalued Care Work
Demand for these roles is already surging due to an aging population, rising intellectual and developmental disabilities, mental health challenges, and gaps in education and childcare. Yet many of these positions are poorly paid, leading to high turnover and chronic shortages.
Direct support professionals for adults with autism, for example, perform life-changing work but often face turnover rates near 40% due to low wages. Flooding the market with displaced workers from AI disruption would only depress wages and conditions further — a recipe for neither dignity nor progress.
A Two-Part Strategy
**First**, we must make these jobs dignified by improving compensation, benefits, worker voice, training, and career pathways. Care workers, educators, and counselors deserve pay and respect commensurate with the profound value they provide.
**Second**, we must dramatically expand the number of these jobs to meet massive unmet needs:
- Millions of Americans with intellectual and developmental disabilities lack adequate individualized support.
- Family caregivers are forced to leave or reduce work because they cannot access reliable care for loved ones.
- Millions of students attend schools without sufficient counselors or psychologists.
- Childcare shortages persist despite overwhelming demand.
- Rural areas face chronic shortages of medical and support staff.
- We need far more navigators to help people access benefits, re-enter society after incarceration, and overcome addiction or long-term unemployment.
Leveraging AI and Funding the Future
AI itself can be deployed as a powerful tool to *augment* these workers — increasing their productivity, reducing administrative burdens, and improving outcomes while lowering societal costs in healthcare, safety-net spending, and lost workforce participation.
If AI ultimately produces structural net job loss, we should create a dedicated revenue stream from AI productivity gains to fund a permanent expansion of double-dignity jobs. This could be paired with New Deal-style infrastructure and construction employment for resilience and efficiency. The focus, however, must shift toward a sustained, large-scale investment in care, education, counseling, and navigation roles.
This is not a simplistic “retrain coders as nurses” plan. Not everyone will choose these fields. But expanding them would tighten the overall labor market, lift wages and bargaining power across sectors, and align with core American values. As President Franklin Roosevelt’s Labor Secretary Frances Perkins observed, Americans want, above all, “to work and contribute.”
Acting with Urgency and Pragmatism
While projections of AI’s employment impact vary in timing and severity, uncertainty is no excuse for inaction. We can begin now by establishing a new federal fund for double-dignity jobs that supports state and local innovation. Starting with modest but strategic investments would build the institutional infrastructure needed for rapid scaling if displacement accelerates.
We should also prioritize affordability policies — such as universal childcare and expanded home care — that simultaneously create large numbers of AI-resilient, dignity-enhancing jobs.
Artificial intelligence need not condemn us to an economy stripped of work, contribution, and dignity. By deliberately investing in the expansion and elevation of double-dignity jobs, we can harness AI’s gains to build a more humane, resilient, and prosperous society — one where technology serves human flourishing rather than undermining it.