White House says AI could cost U.S. millions of jobs if social services not improved

Artificial intelligence will be essential to the future economic growth of the United States, but if education and social services aren't improved, American workers could lose millions of jobs.

That's the conclusion of a new report from the White House examining the economic impact of artificial intelligence and increasing automation.

The report, released by the White House Tuesday, details the enormous potential benefits as well as the enormous potential job loss that could occur as a result of the rise of artificial intelligence. The solution, according to the report, is to invest more in improving education and the "social safety net" to help prepare American workers for the changes.

Emphasizing the upside to artificial intelligence, the report first notes the importance of artificial intelligence technology to growing the economy. "Advances in AI technology hold incredible potential to help the United States stay on the cutting edge of innovation," the report says.

"As we look at AI, our biggest economic concern is we won't have enough of it and that we won't have enough productivity growth," Jason Furman, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, said during a call with reporters Tuesday. "Anything we can do to have more AI will contribute to more productivity growth and will help make possible more wage and income growth."

While the report doesn't discuss specific types of AI technology in depth, it calls out fraud detection and cyberdefense as industries that could especially benefit from advancements in AI. Less clear is which industries will be most negatively impacted by AI, though the report notes that "lower-paid, lower-skilled, and less-educated workers" are most likely to find their jobs threatened.

As a result, the report proposes improvements to education -- beginning with early childhood education -- and increased investment in job training and retraining programs to help workers learn the skills they need in more AI-driven careers.

Also recommended: strengthening the "social safety net" for those who may otherwise fall through the cracks. This includes improvements and expansions to services like unemployment insurance and Medicaid, as well as job-search assistance and a higher minimum wage.

Of course, these policy proposals are unlikely to be popular with the incoming administration. Donald Trump's pick for secretary of labor has been a vocal critic of increasing the minimum wage and Republicans have previously opposed expanding unemployment and other services.

Furman said failure to implement these policies could be "more risky."

"One implication of this analysis is if you, for example, seriously roll back the social safety net that would potentially be more risky at a time when you have these types of changes in the economy," he said. "It would certainly heighten the set of concerns one already would have had.'