Artificial Intelligence seems likely to alter almost every field of human endeavour producing wide benefits for society. Concurrently it seems likely to produce accelerated change in the workplace altering both employment and employment patterns to such a degree that new public policy models may be necessary to maintain social cohesion.
There are very strong countervailing trends emerging. Rapid aging and declining birth rates in OECD countries may well lead to labour shortages and to taxpayer shortages. The later problem is going to call for innovative thinking in
finance departments across the OECD and in China that has the same demographic problem.
In a perfect world automation would exactly offset labour shortages due to aging but a perfect match of skills seems improbable.
It appears likely that the rise in the application of robots in production will lead to reduced wages or reduced employment for low skilled workers for a long time and increased returns on capital leading to rising inequality.
It may also lead to reduced demand for high skill "white collar" jobs such as radiologists. This change in occupational demand will call for a good deal of social innovation some of which may be AI supported. Employment "adjustments"
will be localized with some regions being net winners and others net losers. Disparities between those benefiting and those losing will also vary by country. Those jurisdictions with progressive, "loophole free", tax systems seem likely to weather the coming social cohesion crises better.
AI could substantially enhance productivity with resulting lower consumer costs, increased overall standards of living, increased rates of economic growth and improved tax revenues.
The unbundling of jobs into tasks that can be handled remotely either via online gig employees or AI applications seems to be rising.
Each jursidiction will face different adjustment challenges. Some jursidictions may not be able to support both trade adjustments and AIification adjustments. And some will not be able to win the fruits of AIification.
