As unemployment looms, humanity begins a program to track AI’s economic fallout

Silicon Valley has expressed its opinion on the promise of generative AI to build new career paths and economic opportunities, as is new and coveted Solo Unicorn Startup. Banks and analysts advertise AI Possibility to increase GDP. But these benefits are not Evenly distributed Faced with what many people expect Wide range of AI-related unemployment.

In this background, Friday’s humanity Release Its Economic Futures Program is a new initiative that supports research into AI’s labour market and impact on the global economy, and a new initiative to develop policy proposals to prepare for shifts.

“The people who are asking questions about what the economic impact of AI is both positive and negative,” Sarah Heck, head of human policy programs and partnerships, told TechCrunch. “It’s really important to eradicate these conversations in evidence, and it’s very important that you don’t have any consequences or views on what’s going on (and happening).”

At least one well-known name shares his views on the potential economic impacts of AI: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. May, AMODAI It was predicted AI has been able to wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and raise the unemployment rate to 20% over the next 1-5 years.

When asked whether one of the key goals of human economic futures programmes was to study ways to alleviate AI-related unemployment, Heck was cautious.

“I think the key goal is to understand what’s actually going on,” she said. “If there’s unemployment, we need to convene a group of thinkers to talk about mitigation. If there’s a huge GDP expansion, that’s great. We need to convene policymakers to figure out what to do with that. I don’t think this will be a monolith.”

This program is based on the existence of humanity. Economic IndexIt will be launched in February and combined with open source aggregation and anonymized data to analyse the effects of AI on the labor market and the economy over a long period of time. Data that many of its competitors lock behind the walls of the company.

The program will focus on three main areas: Grants will be provided to researchers investigating the impact of AI on labor, productivity, and value creation. Create a forum for developing and evaluating policy proposals to prepare for the economic impact of AI. Build a dataset to track the economic use and impact of AI.

Humanity has started the program with several action items.

The company has launched applications for rapid grants of up to $50,000 for “empirical studies on the economic impact of AI,” and evidence-based policy proposals for artificial host symposium events in Washington, DC and Europe in the fall. Humanity also seeks partnerships with independent research institutions, providing partners with Claude API credits and other resources to support their research.

Regarding grants, Heck pointed out that humanity is looking for individuals, academics, or teams who can come up with high-quality data in a short period of time.

“We want to complete it within six months,” she said. “There’s no need to peer review.”

For the symposium, Heck said humanity wants policy ideas from a variety of backgrounds and intellectual perspectives. She said policy proposals go “beyond labor.”

“We want to understand more about the transition,” she said. “How do workflows happen in new ways? How are new jobs created that no one has ever thought of before?

Heck said he also hopes that humanity will study the effects of AI on fiscal policy. For example, what happens when there is a major change in the way companies see value creation?

“We want to open the opening here for things that we can really study,” Heck said. “It’s true that labor is one of them, but it’s a much wider strip.”

Humanity’s rival Openai has released its own release Economic Blueprint In January, it focuses on establishing an “AI economic zone” that helps the public adopt AI tools, build robust AI infrastructure and streamlines regulations to drive investment. Openai’s Stargate The project, which will work with Oracle and SoftBank to build data centers across the US, has created thousands of construction jobs, and Openai will not directly address AI-related unemployment with its economic blueprint.

However, Openai’s blueprint outlines an overview that allows governments to play a role in supply chain training pipelines, investing in AI literacy, supporting local training programs, and expanding access to public universities to promote the local AI literate workforce.

Human economic impact programs are part of a slow, growing change between some tech companies, whether it be reputational concerns, authentic altruism, or a combination of both, to position themselves as part of the solutions that help them create. For example, on Thursday, the ride company Lyft has launched a forum Collect input from human drivers as they begin to integrate into the Robotaxis platform.