Will AI take our jobs?

People want to work, but less. AI makes this happen.

Question: Will AI take our jobs?
Position‹2 of 3›: Partially: AI will take many jobs, but not all of them
Argument‹2 of 2: People want to work, but less. AI makes this happen.

Governments will plan the redistribution of work, directing everyone to work fewer hours while providing them with a basic income to keep the economy functioning.

The argument

While Artificial Intelligence will take some of our jobs, that is not the end of the story. In reality, AI will create more jobs than it takes away. Furthermore, universal basic income will stabilize the economy so that those who do lose their jobs have time to find another one-possibly in the technology sector itself. In San Fransisco, a robot owner tax policy striving to fund a universal basic income is currently progressing quickly. Company-wide policies, like Amazon's promise to fund 95% of the cost of retraining warehouse workers if their jobs are taken by AI, is also a viable alternative that suggests the AI "takeover" will be limited

Context

Centrally planned economics and a universal basic income will allow us to cope with the major labour challenges presented by automation and AI. Universal basic income is the provision of a basic level of wealth to all citizens of a state regardless of their work status.

Premises

[P1]While AI will take some jobs, it is expected to create more jobs than it eliminates. [P2] Measures like a universal basic income, funded by proposals such as San Francisco's robot-owner tax, can stabilize the economy and give displaced workers time to find new work. [P3] Employers like Amazon are already promising to fund retraining for workers whose jobs AI takes, suggesting the takeover will be limited. [C] Therefore, because people want to work but less, and AI helps make that happen, AI will take many jobs but not all of them.

Counter-arguments

In theory, this is a fantastic idea, but stable universal basic income is not yet possible. According to Bill Gates, “Even the U.S. isn’t rich enough to allow people not to work. Someday we will be, but until then, things like the Earned Income Tax Credit will help increase the demand for labor.” Simply put, the timeline for universal basic income becoming a viable option and the transition to Artificial Intelligence may not match up. This would leave workers without jobs, as AI replaces them.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] This is the central empirical claim and it is asserted without evidence. Whether automation creates more jobs than it destroys is genuinely contested, and earlier technological transitions offer only partial guidance, because the displacement and the creation fall on different people, in different places, with a lag that can last a working lifetime. [Rejecting P2] A proposed local tax is not a funded income scheme, and a basic income set at a level people can live on is a very large fiscal commitment that no country has enacted at scale — the counter's point about timing. The premise also treats a stabilisation measure as though it were the mechanism limiting job loss, when at most it cushions the loss. [Rejecting P3] One employer's voluntary retraining pledge is not evidence about the scale of displacement, and retraining programmes have a mixed record at moving displaced workers into comparably paid work. The conclusion does not follow either: nothing in these premises establishes that people want to work less, and the position they support is compatible with an outcome the argument treats as benign but which its own premises leave wide open.