Generative AI and the Future of Inequality

Will new technology consign human workers to the garbage dump of history? Prior waves of concern over technological mass unemployment have typically come during periods of, well, mass unemployment. During the depths of the Great Depression, manufacturing automation became a target of policy makers, labor unions, and mass media condemnation. As one cartoon from that era presciently asked, "Is the robot beginning to think?" (). Amidst the halting recovery from the Great Recession, fears of robotization and technological substitution reappeared (; ). In the intervening 80 years, waves of unemployment and inequality had brought periodic attention to the way that ingenious new tools could, more or less temporarily and more or less locally, make our skills obsolete more quickly than they could generate new demand and new uses of human ingenuity. And if technological progress has never brought permanent mass unemployment to developed countries, it has delivered winners and losers and substantial adjustment costs ().