Can AI Be a Force for Good in the Workforce?

The Financial Page Can A.I. Be Pro-Worker? As fears of mass unemployment grow, three leading economists advocate some policies to shift the focus from job displacement to job enhancement. By John Cassidy March 2, 2026 Source photograph from Getty / NanoStockk Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story You’re reading The Financial Page , John Cassidy’s weekly column on economics and politics. In recent weeks, remarkable things have been happening on Wall Street. As the major A.I. developers have been rolling out new versions of their models, and new work tools to sit atop them, investors have been knocking down the value of many big and profitable companies over fears that their businesses and employees will be disrupted, or displaced entirely. Hundreds of billions of dollars of value have been wiped out. Enterprise-software companies, like Salesforce and Workday; cybersecurity companies, like CrowdStrike; and wealth managers, such as Charles Schwab and Raymond James—they’ve all been hit. Early last week, selling extended to the broader market after Citrini Research, a little-known financial-research firm, posted a lengthy “thought exercise” about the impact of A.I., in which, by 2028, Citrini claims, soaring unemployment among white-collar workers will crimp consumer spending, and this will plunge the economy into a financial crisis and a recession. Later in the week, as other analysts poked holes in the Citrini scenario, the market recovered some of its losses. But the gyrations illustrate the power of two assumptions about A.I. that go largely unquestioned, on Wall Street and elsewhere: that the new technology is so powerful that it will transform the economy utterly; and that, despite being designed by humans, it’s now a force unto itself, whose progress can’t be reshaped or redirected. In short, we are all slaves to the A.I. algorithms and their inner workings, which remain somewhat mysterious even to their creators. When you think about it, this second assumption is both terrifying and ahistoric. In the paperback edition of their 2023 book, “ Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity ,” Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, two M.I.T. economists, point out that the lesson of earlier economic transformations is: “you can’t stop technological change, but you can shape it.” In early British textile factories, women and children worked twelve-plus-hour days in unsanitary environments. It took the advent of factory legislation to shorten the workday and improve working conditions. And in many countries, including the United States, the rise of labor unions was a key factor in insuring that technology-driven productivity gains fed through to wage increases and expanded employment benefits as well as higher profits. The Treaty of Detroit, a five-year wage contract agreed upon by General Motors and the United Auto Workers in 1950, made this compact explicit. Acemoglu and Johnson are leaders in their field: they shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics with a University of Chicago economist, James Robinson. In a new report for the Brookings Institution titled “ Building pro-worker AI ,” which Acemoglu and Johnson wrote with another noted M.I.T. economist, David Autor, they challenge the assumption of societal powerlessness in the face of A.I. They lay out a policy agenda designed to make sure that it acts as “a force magnifier for human expertise” rather than as a job killer. “We have a lot of agency, a lot of choice in shaping the future of technology,” Acemoglu told the MIT Sloan Management Review , “and different futures correspond to different winners and losers, different benefits, different costs, different productivities.” As an example of how A.I. could be used in a pro-worker fashion, the report points to an Electrician’s Assistant (EA), developed by Schneider Electric, a French-based multinational company. When confronted by a tricky problem, the electrician feeds information and pictures into an assistant, which is a large language A.I. model. The assistant conducts a diagnosis and issues recommendations, in an iterative fashion, for how to fix the problem. It also helps the electrician file maintenance reports, and the paper cites evidence that the time spent on this task has been halved. “Tools akin to EA could be readily built to support many additional trade and modern craft workers, such as plumbers, building contractors, and health-care workers,” the report says. This is an encouraging story, but how representative is it? For every example like the Electrician’s Assistant, there is one in which A.I. is already displacing jobs, or, at least, it’s being used as an excuse for big layoffs. Last week, Block, a financial-services platform, announced that it was getting rid of four thousand workers, out of ten thousand in total, on the ground that A.I. could do their jobs. Even in cases where companies have employed A.I. programs without engaging in