Late last month, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a new AI tool that can tell stories and write code. It has the potential to take over certain roles traditionally held by humans, such as copywriting, answering customer service inquiries, writing news reports, and creating legal documents. As AI continues to improve, more and more current jobs will be threatened by automation. But AI presents opportunities as well and will create new jobs and different kinds of organizations. The question isn’t whether AI will be good enough to take on more cognitive tasks but rather how we’ll adapt. Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman is the world’s leading expert in human judgment and spent a lifetime documenting its shortcomings. Yes, AI may have flaws, but human reasoning is deeply flawed, too. Therefore, “Clearly AI is going to win,” Kahneman remarked in 2021. “How people adjust is a fascinating problem.”
The key to adjusting is figuring out how to redesign our economic systems to fully engage the working population. That will require system solutions that don’t just shift the same tasks between people and machines. As we describe in our new book, Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence, a system solution changes a workflow, disrupting old ways of doing things and generating new ones.