Ian Explains: How will AI impact the workplace?

Generative AI could increase productivity and prosperity... but also replace jobs and increase global inequality.

As long as humans have been inventing new technology, they’ve worried it will replace their jobs. From Ancient Greece to Elizabethan England, people feared machines and automation would eliminate the need for human labor. Hundreds of years later, the same conversation is happening around artificial intelligence—the most powerful technology to hit the workforce since the personal computer.

On Ian Explains, Ian Bremmer looks at the history of human anxiety about being replaced by machines and the impact this new AI era will have on today’s workers. Will AI be the productivity booster CEOs hope for, or the job-killer employees fear? Experts are torn. Goldman Sachs predicts a $7 trillion increase in global GDP over the next decade from advances in AI, but the International Monetary Fund estimates that AI will negatively impact 40% of all jobs globally in the same time frame.

Human capital has been the powerhouse of economic growth for most of history, but the unprecedented pace of advances in AI is stirring up excitement and deep anxieties about not only how we work but if we’ll work at all.

Watch the upcoming episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer on US public television this weekend (check local listings) and at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld.