The Cost of Superintelligence

No question hangs over the future of New York’s economy as clearly as AI’s impact on work. Past waves of automation emptied farms and hollowed out factories. This one reaches into the office, targeting the administrative, legal, financial, and technical jobs that are highly concentrated in New York. Whose jobs are at risk of displacement? How fast will the effects arrive? Will new jobs replace those lost?

This spring, Dr. Hugh O’Neill and the Urban Tech Hub’s Dr. Anthony Townsend sought to address a question the economic development field hasn’t really answered yet: how should we think about AI’s impact on work and employment? They developed a dashboard that estimates AI exposure for 845 occupations across New York State’s 11 labor market regions, and shows outcome distributions for 20,000 runs using randomly-sampled assumptions about AI adoption, and displacement or augmentation of existing work.

The dual aims are to inform NYS Governor Hochul’s FutureWorks Commission, established this spring to advise on AI, the economy, and workforce, and advance broader policy conversations surrounding the nation’s collective uncertain technological and economic futures.