Congress will eventually act on AI and labor. The question is whether it acts on a foundation the labs helped build or on one assembled in their absence.

"America needs more jobs, and it needs them now.” 

It was true in 1971 when President Richard Nixon signed the Emergency Employment Act into law. It’s also true today and will likely remain so well into the future unless the government intervenes. A slew of factors, including but not limited to geopolitical discord, trade wars, artificial intelligence, and a reckoning from COVID-era business decisions, have led to a “low hire, low fire” labor market. People are staying put (or attempting to). Firms are holding on to their staff (or augmenting and automating with AI).  

This dynamic has put a particular tight squeeze on the job prospects of young Americans. The current unemployment rate for Americans ages 22 to 27 is 7.8 percent, nearly twice the national unemployment rate of 4.2 percent. It’s time to review several pages of economic history and prepare for a world in which young Americans find themselves in even more dire straits. 

The AI policy analysis offered by many outlets, including Lawfare and AI Frontiers, has generally focused on frontier model risk, export controls, and compute governance — all very important topics. The labor market consequences of the same technology have received comparatively little sustained attention from the national security community, even though a generation of scarred young workers would weaken the very industrial and human-capital base that AI competition is meant to protect. Congress’s response to AI workforce disruption is, in this sense, a national security question hiding in plain sight. 

This essay first outlines divergent forecasts of job opportunities, then explores how the federal government responded to similar concerns in the 1970s, and concludes with a set of recommended policy experiments that require public-private collaboration and have the potential to set America’s youth up for success.

...read more at civitasoutlook.com