Historically, technological change requires workers to adjust to new aspects of their jobs, while also making some jobs obsolete and creating others in an ongoing cycle of creative disruption. Work on computerization and the workforce highlighted a hollowing out or polarization of the labor market into high-wage, high skill and low-wage, low-skill jobs. More recently, the impacts of innovations related to artificial intelligence (AI) are rippling through the workforce. The concern about this new wave of technologies is that the employment impacts will be different than they have been historically, and will affect not only low-wage jobs (e.g., manufacturing, transportation, warehousing), but also many high-wage jobs employing highly educated people. Whether AI substitutes for workers will be determined by the extent that AI functions as a labor-enabling or a labor-replacing technology. Unraveling AI’s impacts on the labor force is a complex task that requires an evaluation of the skills, tasks, and knowledge content of jobs, the identification of alternative occupations, and an assessment of the industrial and occupational diversity of local labor markets.
This special session is dedicated to work analyzing the impacts of AI on the workforce. Theoretical and empirical papers that provide new insights about the workforce impacts of AI are welcome. Potential research areas include but not limited to: