Think Tank

How to deal with the potential employment impact of artificial intelligence

2025-07-14   

When people increasingly realize that artificial intelligence will be omnipotent and endanger various job positions, and become worried about it, they actually fall into a paradoxical mindset. Dealing with the potential employment impact of artificial intelligence should not be left to fate, let alone attempting to hinder the development of the technology itself. The only unavoidable and correct choice is to actively guide the development and application direction of artificial intelligence, and avoid or respond to the spontaneous effects of artificial intelligence on employment. The enormous energy of using artificial intelligence to accelerate technological progress directly creates job opportunities. The superiority of artificial intelligence over any new technology or even many core generic technologies lies in its ability to accelerate all transformation processes. This is true both in terms of its positive and negative aspects. For the issue of creating or destroying employment, the long-standing problems of asymmetry and time lag, or the problem of employment creation being less in quantity and lagging behind employment destruction, are expected to be solved under this powerful technological capability. As an example in this regard, artificial intelligence technology platforms can significantly accelerate the incubation of industries, thus greatly shortening the time for the emergence of start-up market operators and unleashing employment creation potential in a shorter period of time. The dialectical unity between total social supply and total demand can both generate new job demands and create new job supplies. The main contradiction in Chinese society in the new era has transformed into the contradiction between the growing needs of the people for a better life and the unbalanced and inadequate development. This means that although demand side factors are increasingly becoming the main constraint on economic growth, many of the needs of urban and rural residents to improve their quality of life and well-being have not been fully met on the supply side. In addition, the promotion of coping with aging, climate change and green transformation, the transformation of development mode, the construction of the "the Belt and Road", and the transformation to a dual cycle pattern with the domestic big cycle as the main body have also created strong demand for new consumer goods, investment goods, services, public goods, and so on, which also puts forward effective demand for the development of the AI enabling industry and expansion of quality supply, and will inevitably create new jobs accordingly. Promote human-machine collaboration and strive to achieve a state of mutual progress between humans and machines. Although there is currently no consensus on who will dominate between human intelligence and artificial intelligence in the future, it can be imagined that for a considerable period of time, both types of intelligence will have relative advantages and will still coexist peacefully. This provides a sufficiently large space to utilize artificial intelligence related technologies to rearrange work tasks, reshape production processes, and expand the boundaries of labor capabilities. On the one hand, it promotes human-machine collaboration models within the enterprise, and on the other hand, it gives rise to new forms of human-machine collaboration, stabilizing and even increasing human labor positions. Since human-machine collaboration can be achieved through multiple paths, it means there are multiple possibilities for job creation. For example, by reorganizing and configuring tasks, robots can take over programmatic and repetitive work, while helping workers transition to decision-making, more creative, and adaptable positions; By enhancing task complexity and extending the industry chain, we can increase the number of human-machine collaborative positions; Create complementary positions while promoting skill upgrading; Lowering the skill threshold for various industries, and so on. By changing the definition of employment, creating new types of jobs that were not previously considered employment, and sharing the fruits of productivity improvement through institutional arrangements, providing reasons and conditions for the continued existence of jobs that have not yet improved productivity but have demand, or by changing the definition of employment, creating new types of jobs that were not previously considered employment. If artificial intelligence systems are allowed to spontaneously replace employment positions, those replaced workers will be massively transferred to low productivity sectors, causing a decrease in overall productivity. At the same time, the employment quality and wage levels of these workers will also decline, and the income gap in the whole society will widen. If within a reasonable range of productivity sharing and expanding social demand, it is possible to decouple the compensation level of new positions from productivity levels, then the result of labor reallocation means creating more Baumol type positions with social demand. Through policy adjustments and institutional construction, the necessary conditions for achieving employment goals can be created. All assumed employment creation that can be greater than, earlier than, or synchronous with employment destruction may not naturally occur, or there is no so-called trickle down effect. Instead, it is necessary to create the necessary conditions for achieving these goals through policy adjustments and institutional construction. An indispensable chain of necessary conditions can be expressed as follows: firstly, artificial intelligence technology can indeed be transformed into a means to improve productivity; Secondly, the increase in productivity can correspondingly translate into an increase in residents' income; Thirdly, the increase in per capita income can be transformed into new consumer demands. From this, it can be seen that technology itself does not provide all the answers about the impact on employment. The adaptive changes in the economic and social system and their effectiveness are the determining factors that affect the final outcome. Here, it is important to emphasize the significance of bridging the potential 'artificial intelligence divide'. It can be expected that on the one hand, artificial intelligence may generate unprecedented opportunities, creating new job positions and employment forms; On the other hand, artificial intelligence will also pose unprecedented technological barriers to certain populations. Before employment creation ultimately benefits all workers, employment difficulties and labor market shocks always come first to specific vulnerable groups. Therefore, the ability and opportunities of using artificial intelligence to create employment, prevent labor market shocks and risks, inevitably require all workers to be equal AI users: with equal access opportunities, convenience, necessary knowledge, and cost bearing capacity. Beyond this traditional 'technological divide', the development of artificial intelligence has also created a special type of 'divide', manifested in the asymmetry between creators and potential users of artificial intelligence. Perhaps due to the strong breakthrough, fast speed, and large pace of artificial intelligence technology, potential technology users may have a relatively backward understanding of the technology itself and insufficient knowledge on how to apply and use new technologies. Or in other words, the innovation, imagination, and initiative in the application of artificial intelligence technology are far inferior to the technology and model creation themselves. At the same time, whether it is large technology companies or small and medium-sized startups, they are constantly pursuing technological breakthroughs that can make them stand out due to the enormous competitive pressure they face. Therefore, how to make good use of technology itself and how to achieve the goal of technology for good through collaborative action with users are naturally not on their priority agenda. It can be seen that eliminating the knowledge gap between the creation and application of artificial intelligence should also be the direction of regulation and incentive mechanisms. (New Society)

Edit:Luo yu Responsible editor:Wang xiao jing

Source:Beijing Daily

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