Top economist Tyler Cowen on the biggest problem of the AI age: not mass unemployment but adjusting to a new reality | Fortune

AI is expected to avoid mass unemployment while still transforming most jobs. The adjustment is likely uneven across occupations. High-risk groups include elite professionals whose careers rely on credentials and established rules, such as lawyers, strategy consultants, and finance partners. People most likely to benefit are those who take initiative, learn how AI and agents work, and shift to new tasks. Psychological harm may outweigh financial harm when status declines. Status loss can be more painful than income loss, especially for professional identities tied to intellectual mastery and institutional prestige. AI-driven commoditization of expertise can trigger identity crises and broader social disruption.

"“AI will not bring mass unemployment,” the George Mason University economist and Bloomberg columnist said during a keynote at the Sana AI summit at the New York Public Library in New York City. “But it will change most jobs.” For Cowen, that distinction matters enormously. And it points to a problem that may be harder to solve than unemployment: the psychological, social, and institutional cost of adjustment."

"“Those are actually the people who might lose,” he said. “The people who will win are the people who are best at taking initiative, figuring out how AI works, figuring out how agents work, doing something different,” including, Cowen suggested, workers in the developing world and immigrants who never had access to those rules in the first place."

"“When some people go up in status, and some go down in status, I will tell you, those who lose suffer more psychologically than those who gain.” Status loss, he argued, hits harder than income loss - and for a professional class that has built its identity around intellectual mastery and institutional prestige, watching AI commoditize that mastery is an identity crisis, not just a career one."

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