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The Real Question About AI: Is it Making All of Us Better Off?
Artificial intelligence promises to transform human potential. Here’s how we can make sure everyone gets that opportunity. Maria Flynn, CEO of Jobs for the Future, shares new findings about how different people use AI, and four steps to distribute its benefits fairly.
We all knew the artificial intelligence revolution was coming, but few of us anticipated how quickly and thoroughly it would change the ways we work, learn, and live. From medical breakthroughs to climate solutions, these developments offer promises of human potential amplified by intelligent technology.
But history shows us that technological revolutions often come with troubling disparities. The Industrial Revolution, while spurring productivity gains and economic growth, initially displaced skilled artisans and created jobs with dangerous conditions and low pay. Today, the current landscape of AI already shows concerning signs of a widening digital divide, with women and people with less than a bachelor’s degree using generative AI at lower rates than men and people with four-year degrees or above.
Viewed together, the future and the past raise a critical question about AI: Are we building a world that benefits everyone?
Four Actions for Shared AI Prosperity
Knowing both AI’s potential and risks, it’s more important than ever to be clear about what we consider success in a world powered by AI. At Jobs for the Future, we believe that the standard of success needs to be whether AI makes all of us better off—through higher-quality jobs, wealth-building opportunities, and economic success. This will require a systems-wide effort to move us toward a vision for an AI-enabled future that results in shared prosperity.
There are four key actions we can take:
- Use AI to create and grow innovation, and design quality jobs to unlock uniquely human capabilities: We are quickly moving to a world of AI augmentation. Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, predicted that the “IT department of every company is going to be the HR department of AI agents in the future.” Companies are being built on the promise of autonomous AI agents to take on workflows. The potential of AI to drive economic success is profound; JFF’s recent survey showed that 8% of workers are already using AI to start or grow businesses, and the number rises to 11% among people of color. However, too much of the current narrative focuses narrowly on efficiency and cost-savings as the marker of success. The real promise lies in using AI to level up teams and produce exceptional solutions, like in a recent study done with Procter and Gamble employees, where individuals and teams working in combination with AI produced better solutions than individuals and teams not using AI. To realize the value of true innovation with AI, we should focus on supporting workers, who will help drive that innovation, and on instituting structures where employees can take an active role in the development and deployment of AI. As roles may shift and change as a result of AI, they should prioritize uniquely human skills and job quality. Only then will we capitalize on the potential of AI.
- Empower learners and workers with the skills and supports they need to pursue economic opportunities in the age of AI: As AI dramatically changes the landscape of jobs and skills, workers and learners will need support in identifying and training for the best-fit opportunities for them. With countries around the world, such as China, Singapore, and Finland already making strides on universal AI literacy, this will be a key driver of U.S. economic competitiveness and a powerful tool towards achieving JFF’s vision that by 2033, 75 million Americans facing barriers to economic advancement will have quality jobs. While job details may change, we know that training people in foundational AI literacy will be critical to give people the tools to leverage AI’s benefits, and that future-ready skills such as durable skills, entrepreneurship, computational thinking, and data literacy will be evergreen. On top of that, supporting workers to seek out new career opportunities, through social capital, career navigation, and coaching, will be needed in an AI-powered world.
- Ensure all can shape and benefit from AI’s potential to shape opportunity: Outputs of AI are a reflection of the data it is trained on and the people who create it. Currently, people of color and women are underrepresented in developing and creating AI technologies, which leaves room for biased and ineffective systems. We need more people at the table to build and shape AI across the adoption lifecycle. This starts with access to the technology itself—including closing digital divides to ensure connectivity to use the tools and free access to advanced models. This also includes expanding access to training and careers in AI, so that the people building AI models and tools better reflect populations facing barriers to advancement. Lastly, this extends to more people benefiting from AI training approaches as well as actively contributing to the development of AI-powered technologies.
- Prepare education and workforce systems for a transformed future: AI is transforming the way we work and learn at a rapid pace. Recent research from Harvard bears this out, showing that occupational churn has accelerated since 2019, likely as a result of AI. As AI technologies continue to advance and adoption grows, the impact will continually shift and change what jobs look like, what skills are needed, and what occupations face major disruption. Our education and workforce systems must become more flexible and responsive to these rapid changes in order to better support workers and learners. Building responsive infrastructure, like real-time labor market data, digital credentials and LERs, lifelong learning accounts, and transitional assistance, will lay a foundation for agility. Institutional capacity building to adopt AI and novel approaches to creating curriculum, assessment, and learning programs will also be key.
The unprecedented speed of AI development gives us both an extraordinary opportunity and a profound responsibility. We can use these powerful tools to create a more prosperous, equitable, and fulfilling economic future—but only if we intentionally design for that outcome.
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