The narrative surrounding AI seems to operate purely at either the fantastical or the tragic. Advocates believe it will transform the world, whereas pessimists believe it more likely to enslave us all. A central concern is that AI will take many of our jobs, with any benefits concentrated in the hands of a few tech moguls.
Recent research from the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) argues that this perception about the impact of AI on our social welfare is ill-founded. Indeed, they found that there appears to be a clear relationship between AI-related jobs and economic growth, which in turn results in greater well-being across society.
It’s a finding that was echoed by recent research from Berkeley Haas, which found that greater investment in AI was linked to greater productivity and therefore market share, which also resulted in more jobs being created across both individual firms and industries more broadly.
Growing demand
The Stanford paper highlights how demand for AI-related jobs has been growing in recent years, despite the demand being highly variable between not only cities but industries too.
They utilized Stanford HAI’s AI Index, which is an open-source project that tracks and visualizes various datasets related to AI, to monitor AI-related job listings in cities across the US. This showed them that cities with the biggest increase in such jobs also experienced greater economic growth. It was a relationship that was largely dependent on the city’s ability to capitalize on these capabilities to create AI-driven opportunities. In other words, it was cities with the right infrastructure, such as an educated workforce and high-tech industry, that tended to benefit most from this growth.
The researchers then compared this with happiness and wellbeing at a macro level via Gallup’s US Daily Poll, which quizzes 1,000 people each day on five components of wellbeing, including career, financial, and social. When this data was compared with the number of AI-related jobs in an area, there appeared a clear correlation between improved wellbeing and AI-related job growth, with this especially pronounced in terms of social, physical, and financial wellbeing.
The researchers accept that their results are purely correlative and do not imply any causation between the rise in AI-related jobs and general wellbeing in a community, but they nonetheless believe their findings provide an interesting contribution to our understanding of the impact AI is having.
“The fact that we found this robust, positive association, even after we control for things like education, age, and other measures of industrial composition, I think is all very positive,” the researcher explains.
They also believe their findings could provide a degree of direction to policymakers. For instance, they suggest that policies such as the Endless Frontier Act, could be useful in supporting scientific and technological innovation. If these policies are accompanied by ones promoting higher education, they believe it could help to smooth out any economic inequalities that may emerge between cities.
“Given that [cities] have an educated population set, a good internet connection, and residents with programming skills, they can drive economic growth,” the researchers conclude. “Supporting the AI-based industry can improve the economic growth of any city, and thus the well-being of its residents.”
