Building pro-worker AI

AI's capacity to automate work and displace workers is substantial. But AI also has transformative potential to act as a force-multiplier for human skills and expertise by expanding worker capabilities. This potential arises from AI’s capacity to collaborate with workers, enabling them to be more effective at their existing tasks, tackle new tasks, and acquire new expertise. We define pro-worker technologies—including pro-worker AI—as technologies that make human skills and expertise more valuable. To identify what types of innovations are likely to be pro-worker, it is helpful to group technologies into five broad, economically distinct categories:

1. Labor-augmenting technologies make workers more effective at the tasks they already do.
2. Capital-augmenting technologies make machines (e.g., algorithms, processes, innovations) better, cheaper, or faster at performing their current tasks.
3. Automating technologies directly reshape the division of labor between workers and machines by substituting machinery or algorithms for tasks that were previously performed by workers.
4. Expertise-leveling technologies enable a new set of workers to perform tasks that previously demanded expertise from another domain(s).
5. New task-creating technologies create new human tasks.