Anton Korinek’s statement to the U.S. Senate AI Insight Forum on Workforce

Majority Leader Schumer, Senators Rounds, Heinrich, and Young, and Distinguished Members of the Senate, thank you for organizing this important event today and for inviting me to it. I particularly appreciate the opportunity to speak about the workforce implications of advanced AI on a day when much of the attention of the world’s AI community is focused on the AI Safety Summit in the UK. Ensuring the safety of AI systems is important, but not enough. We also need to prepare for the workforce implications of advanced AI, which I believe will be one of the greatest challenges for our political system in the coming years (Bell and Korinek, 2023).

In the following,

• I will lay out why advances in AI are likely to usher in a new era of cognitive automation,
• I will emphasize the breakneck speed of advances in frontier AI systems and the resulting uncertainty about the workforce implications of future AI,
• I will observe that progress creates the possibility of greater shared prosperity, but that getting there requires policy action, both by steering AI progress and by updating the way our economic institutions allocate income,
• I will propose that the uncertainty calls for scenario planning, including transformative scenarios in which AI can automate most work within 5 to 20 years, and
• I will end with two recommendations for the U.S. Senate to prepare for the workforce implications of future advances in AI.

Read the full statement here.