As businesses adopt artificial intelligence, two efforts are taking shape to help workers who may lose their jobs to the technology.
According to PBS NewsHour, a new nonprofit called RAISE US aims to bring together states, major businesses and AI firms to help workers displaced as companies adopt AI. PBS reports that fears of a wave of job displacement continue to grow as adoption spreads.
Separately, according to Jo Constantz of Bloomberg, California has launched a tool meant to serve as an "early warning system" for widespread AI-driven job loss. Bloomberg reports that the tool links AI exposure with unemployment insurance claims, in effect watching for signs that automation is pushing people out of work.
Bloomberg notes that politicians, including California Governor Gavin Newsom, are under pressure to appear proactive in the face of the technology's rapid spread.
Together, the two initiatives reflect a shift from debating whether AI will displace workers to building practical systems for spotting and responding to it. One approach is private and collaborative, pooling states, employers and AI companies through RAISE US. The other is governmental, using data the state already collects—unemployment claims—paired with measures of which jobs are most exposed to AI.
Why it matters: as AI reshapes the workforce, these efforts are early tests of whether governments and the private sector can detect job losses fast enough to actually help the people affected.