Labor

The Rockefeller Foundation launched a new three-year, $100 million commitment to help communities across the country connect more people to good jobs and adapt to rapid economic and technological change. This Big Bet on Good Jobs for America will focus on places where too many people are out of work—or at risk of falling out of the labor market—including communities vulnerable to disruption from artificial intelligence and other structural shifts in the economy.

Young Americans are scared of more than AI. They're downright panicky about finding a job at all.

Microsoft and North America's Building Trades Unions are supercharging efforts to train workers for the AI economy. NABTU and Microsoft will now offer free AI literacy courses and industry-recognized credentials to millions of skilled craft professionals across North America. The partnership also includes TradesFutures, a nonprofit that connects people to union construction apprenticeships and careers in 34 states.

Many people in the broadband sector across the country and in Washington are rightly concerned about attracting and retaining a skilled workforce to deploy and operate these complex networks. As I think about it, along with permitting and supply chain management, workforce availability is part of a trifecta of the “mechanical aspects” of building and operating broadband networks. If you want to address workforce challenges, you need tools as an employer to attract and retain the best talent. And as a small business based in a rural area, the degree of difficulty is even higher.

The Department of Labor launched the course titled "Make America AI-Ready" with a goal to, in the course's own words, "make AI feel less like a mystery and more like a tool you actually want to use." While AI and media literacy teachers praised the overall content and framework of the course, some of the course materials raise government ethics questions.

The strange way that A.I. looks like a genius at one moment and dense in another is what researchers, engineers and economists call “jagged intelligence.” They use this term to explain why A.I is racing ahead in some areas — like math and computer programming — while still struggling to make headway in others. The term, which is widely used by the people building A.I.

For decades, two kinds of scarcity kept the internet safe — or safe enough. Writing software was hard, so the people who did it were trained, careful and few. Finding bugs was also hard, so the worst flaws stayed hidden, sometimes for decades. It wasn’t a great system. But the difficulty on both sides created a kind of détente that held. But publicly available A.I.

On March 24, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) launched its “Make America AI-Ready Initiative” with a seven-day artificial intelligence (AI) literacy course brought to learners via text messages on their cellphones.

Many American workers associate artificial intelligence with layoffs, less satisfying work, and tech billionaires becoming ever more wealthy at their expense. They may be right. But one can also imagine a world in which the fruits of AI are instead invested in society. What if every K-12 student was taught by well-trained teachers in small classes, every patient interacted with unharried nurses, elders had the opportunity to age with dignity in their own homes or in high-quality residential care facilities, and everyone could find an affordable therapist when needed?

The impact of AI on the job market is starting to show up in the data analyzed by Wall Street firms—so far it's pretty modest, but certainly real. Goldman Sachs looked at occupation-level federal data and scored jobs by AI exposure: separating roles that can be completely substituted by AI (proofreader) and those that can be considered complementary (doctor). They found that AI has both created and destroyed jobs over the past year. It reduced employment in occupations that are easily substituted by AI, translating to a slight 0.16 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate.