Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Rainy day fund would help people who lose their jobs thanks to AI

People looking at a humanoid robot

Spectators look at Tesla's Core Technology Optimus humanoid robot at a conference in Shanghai, China, in September.

CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images

Frazier is an assistant professor at the Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University and a Tarbell fellow.

Artificial intelligence will eliminate jobs.

Companies may not need as many workers as AI increases productivity. Others may simply be swapped out for automated systems. Call it what you want — displacement, replacement or elimination — but the outcome is the same: stagnant, struggling communities. The open question is whether we will learn from mistakes. Will we proactively take steps to support the communities most likely to bear the cost of “innovation.”


We’ve seen what happens when communities experience sustained loss of meaningful work. Globalization caused more than 70,000 factories to close and 5 million manufacturing workers to look for new jobs. Those forced to find work elsewhere rarely found a good substitute. The remaining jobs usually paid less, provided fewer benefits and afforded less security in comparison to a union job at a factory, for example.

Economists assumed that those workers would eventually move to more lucrative pastures and find the areas with more economic vibrancy. Workers stayed put. It’s hard to leave your pasture, when it’s the place you, your family and your community have long called home. This tendency to stay put, though, created a difficult reality. Suddenly, whole communities found their economic well-being on the decline. That’s a recipe for unrest.

The same story played out in my home state, Oregon. New technology and policies rendered the timber industry a dying trade. Residents of towns like Mill City, a timber town through and through, didn’t jointly march to a new area but understandably stayed where their families had established deep roots.

It’s time to stop assuming that people will give up on their communities. Home is much more than just a job. So when AI eliminates jobs, what safeguards will be in place so that people can remain in their communities and find other ways to thrive?

I don’t have a full answer to that question, but there’s at least one safeguard that deserves consideration: a rainy day fund. We don’t know when, where and how rapidly AI will upend a community’s economic well-being. That’s why we need to create a support fund that can help folks who suddenly find themselves with no good options. This would mark an improvement on unemployment because it would be specifically targeted to assist those on the losing end of our AI gamble and should be available to both laborers and local governments.

The AI companies responsible for prioritizing their pursuit of artificial general intelligence — AI systems with human-level capabilities — over community stability should front the costs of that fund. Congress can and should tax the companies actively inducing a new wave of displacement.

The fund should be dispersed upon any sizable disruption to a specific industry or sector. Both cities and workers could apply for support to weather economic doldrums and find new ways to thrive. Such support helped us all get through Covid. A similar strategy might help mitigate the worst-case scenarios associated with AI.

The potential downsides of this fund are worth the certain benefits of more resilient communities. A tax or penalty on AI would hinder the ability of AI companies to develop and deploy AI as quickly as possible. The specific allocation of that revenue to a rainy day fund might also nudge companies to avoid creating models likely to disrupt various professions. That’s all fine by me. We have survived centuries without AI, there’s no need for the latest and greatest model to come as soon as possible, especially given the immense costs of that pace of innovation.

Now is the time for Congress to enact such a proposal. Following the election, we may find Congress to be even more gridlocked and fragmented than before. Elected officials should welcome the chance to tell their constituents about a policy to bolster their economic prospects.

The urgency to address the job displacement caused by AI cannot be overstated. By establishing a rainy day fund, taxing AI companies to support displaced workers and exploring additional policies to maintain community stability, we can mitigate the adverse effects of rapid technological advancement. Congress must prioritize the well-being of communities over the relentless pursuit of AI innovation. Doing so will not only knit a stronger social fabric but also ensure AI develops in line with the public interest.

Read More

The Manosphere Is Bad for Boys and Worse for Democracy
a skeleton sitting at a desk with a laptop and keyboard
Photo by Growtika on Unsplash

The Manosphere Is Bad for Boys and Worse for Democracy

15-year-old Owen Cooper made history to become the youngest male to win an Emmy Award. In the Netflix series Adolescence, Owen plays the role of a 13-year-old schoolboy who is arrested after the murder of a girl in his school. As we follow the events leading up to the crime, the award-winning series forces us to confront legitimate insecurities that many teenage boys face, from lack of physical prowess to emotional disconnection from their fathers. It also exposes how easily young men, seeking comfort in their computers, can be pulled into online spaces that normalize misogyny and rage; a pipeline enabled by a failure of tech policy.

At the center of this danger lies the manosphere: a global network of influencers whose words can radicalize young men and channel their frustrations into violence. But this is more than a social crisis affecting some young men. It is a growing threat to the democratic values of equality and tolerance that keep us all safe.

Keep ReadingShow less
Your Data Isn’t Yours: How Social Media Platforms Profit From Your Digital Identity

Discover how your personal data is tracked, sold, and used to control your online experience—and how to reclaim your digital rights.

Getty Images, Sorapop

Your Data Isn’t Yours: How Social Media Platforms Profit From Your Digital Identity

Social media users and digital consumers willingly present a detailed trail of personal data in the pursuit of searching, watching, and engaging on as many platforms as possible. Signing up and signing on is made to be as easy as possible. Most people know on some level that they are giving up more data than they should , but with hopes that it won’t be used surreptitiously by scammers, and certainly not for surveillance of any sort.

However, in his book, "Means of Control," Byron Tau shockingly reveals how much of our digital data is tracked, packaged, and sold—not by scammers but by the brands and organizations we know and trust. As technology has deeply permeated our lives, we have willingly handed over our entire digital identity. Every app we download, every document we create, every social media site we join, there are terms and conditions that none of us ever bother to read.

That means our behaviors, content, and assets are given up to corporations that profit from them in more ways than the average person realizes. The very data and the reuse of it are controlling our lives, our freedom, and our well-being.

Let’s think about all this in the context of a social media site. It is a place where you interact with friends, post family photos, and highlight your art and videos. You may even share a perspective on current events. These very social media platforms don’t just own your content. They can use your behavior and your content to target you. They also sell your data to others, and profit massively off of YOU, their customer.

Keep ReadingShow less
A gavel next to a computer chip with the words "AI" on it.

Often, AI policy debates focus on speculative risks rather than real-world impacts. Kevin Frazier argues that lawmakers and academics must shift their focus from sci-fi scenarios to practical challenges.

Getty Images, Just_Super

Why Academic Debates About AI Mislead Lawmakers—and the Public

Picture this: A congressional hearing on “AI policy” makes the evening news. A senator gravely asks whether artificial intelligence might one day “wake up” and take over the world. Cameras flash. Headlines declare: “Lawmakers Confront the Coming Robot Threat.” Meanwhile, outside the Beltway on main streets across the country, everyday Americans worry about whether AI tools will replace them on factory floors, in call centers, or even in classrooms. Those bread-and-butter concerns—job displacement, worker retraining, and community instability—deserve placement at the top of the agenda for policymakers. Yet legislatures too often get distracted, following academic debates that may intrigue scholars but fail to address the challenges that most directly affect people’s lives.

That misalignment is no coincidence. Academic discourse does not merely fill journals; it actively shapes the policy agenda and popular conceptions of AI. Too many scholars dwell on speculative, even trivial, hypotheticals. They debate whether large language models should be treated as co-authors on scientific papers or whether AI could ever develop consciousness. These conversations filter into the media, morph into lawmaker talking points, and eventually dominate legislative hearings. The result is a political environment where sci-fi scenarios crowd out the issues most relevant to ordinary people—like how to safeguard workers, encourage innovation, and ensure fairness in critical industries. When lawmakers turn to scholars for guidance, they often encounter lofty speculation rather than clear-eyed analysis of how AI is already reshaping specific sectors.

Keep ReadingShow less
A person looking at social media app icons on a phone
A different take on social media and democracy
Matt Cardy/Getty Images

Outrage Over Accuracy: What the Los Angeles Protests Teach About Democracy Online

In Los Angeles this summer, immigration raids sparked days of street protests and a heavy government response — including curfews and the deployment of National Guard troops. But alongside the demonstrations came another, quieter battle: the fight over truth. Old protest videos resurfaced online as if they were new, AI-generated clips blurred the line between fact and fiction, and conspiracy theories about “paid actors” flooded social media feeds.

What played out in Los Angeles was not unique. It is the same dynamic Maria Ressa warned about when she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021. She described disinformation as an “invisible atomic bomb” — a destabilizing force that, like the bomb of 1945, demands new rules and institutions to contain its damage. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world created the United Nations and a framework of international treaties to prevent nuclear catastrophe. Ressa argues that democracy faces a similar moment now: just as we built global safeguards for atomic power, we must now create a digital rule of law to safeguard the information systems that shape civic life.

Keep ReadingShow less