How to help knowledge workers who lose their jobs to AI
Platformer Casey Newton
Molly Kinder, who has spent three years researching how generative AI affects work, argues that job losses will concentrate in high-paid white-collar knowledge jobs during a "messy middle" period lasting potentially decades. Unlike blue-collar or service-sector jobs, computer-based work in law, finance, consulting, and accounting face the greatest near-term exposure to language models like ChatGPT. Rather than adopting universal basic income, Kinder proposes targeted interventions including workforce reinvestment funds, wage insurance, and public job creation to manage the transition without destroying labor market incentives.
Why it matters
Brookings Institution researcher Molly Kinder on why she's leaving her job to create solution for AI's "messy middle." PLUS: Claude Fable arrives
