As policymakers seek solutions to the current and future impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) on workers across the country, workers themselves are using their union bargaining power to negotiate contract provisions that prevent the elimination of jobs, place limits on surveillance and algorithmic management, and enable workers to benefit from productivity boosts offered by AI tools.
AI and machine learning technologies are being used in new ways to automate nonroutine tasks, from writing code and human-sounding text to managing schedules, promising an increase in productivity for some workers. Nevertheless, many workers are understandably nervous that they will be denied the benefits of AI technology. Even as worker productivity increased over the past several decades, those gains went “everywhere but the paychecks of the bottom 80% of workers,” according to research from the Economic Policy Institute. For many workers, AI further threatens to automate parts or all of their jobs or worsen conditions by replacing human decision-making with algorithmic management driven by data harvested via invasive surveillance. Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, predicts “jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop.”
The above excerpt was originally published in the Center for American Progress.
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