4 - Artificial Intelligence in the Production Function

Summary

This chapter provides a macroeconomic perspective of artificial intelligence’s impacts on labor markets and economic growth – although the analysis remains grounded in microeconomic functions. In this chapter, we provide an economic growth model wherein AI as a possible substitute for human labor is modeled, taking into account the nature of AI as an automation technology. This goes to the heart of the current focus of economists on AI, namely its implications for labor markets, and specifically unemployment and skills requirements. The crucial points that we make here are that economists need to go further than indirectly modeling AI through assumptions on substitution elasticities and need to take the specific nature (narrow focus) of AI into explicit account.