AI’s Empire: The Limits Of Knowledge, And Predicting The Job Future
AI’s Empire: The Limits Of Knowledge, And Predicting The Job Future
Publish Date: 2026-06-23 09:36:00
Source Domain: www.forbes.com
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, policymakers warned that the automation of the time would be leading to unemployment rates at 10% or higher. In this 1968 photo, a robot is tested as a replacement for car mechanics.
Mirrorpix via Getty Images
The newly formed Commission on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the American Workforce, announced this past week by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Urban Institute, is the latest in a series of recent efforts to get in front of AI impacts on jobs. It joins the high-profile Peterson Foundation/Windfall Trust conference on AI and jobs earlier in June, the ongoing economic analyses by teams at Open AI and specialized AI providers, and the introduction of the Great American Artificial Intelligence Act in Congress on June 4.
The current efforts follow a half-century of previous “future of work” commissions and committees that were formed to map the employment future in response to technology advances. These previous commissions and committees were well-funded and staffed. Yet, their designs for the job future were quickly overtaken by the pace and nature of job growth that they failed to anticipate.
Often their analyses were at such high levels of generality as to add no guidance to policymakers or practitioners in the job training field. When the commissions did make employment projections, these projections missed badly on the job destruction and creation that did occur, while failing to identify the job occupations and structures that emerged.
Why have these past “future of work” efforts been so unsuccessful? What workforce planning efforts, if any, are worth undertaking today in relation to AI?
Miscalculations with Past Technologies
In California since the 1960s a series of blue ribbon commissions and committees have been established in response to fears of technology replacing jobs.
In June 1963, the state legislature established a Commission on Manpower, Automation and Technology, responding to fears…
