Skills and Future of Work

Rather than proposing universal basic income as the solution to robots supposedly taking all our jobs, the task should be to improve federal worker adjustment assistance programs.

Seventy percent of young Koreans hold university degrees. Only 14 percent of jobs are in large firms. The most immediate concern is not jobs disappearing due to AI, but that there are too few high-quality jobs in the first place.

We should want companies to shed workers they no longer need. Productivity gains flow to lower prices, higher wages, and long-term growth. Don’t slow innovation—accelerate it.

While the Hyundai Motor case now sits at the center of Korea’s AI jobs debate, the evidence suggests that the nation’s more immediate constraints are weak productivity growth and uneven labor-market adjustment—not large-scale technological displacement. How Korea responds will shape its competitiveness in a high-cost, aging manufacturing economy under intensifying global competition.

As of November 2025, with over 400 data centers currently under development, the construction industry is facing a shortage of roughly 439,000 workers.

A report finds that firms that are 125 miles from the closest AI hotspot, defined as an area with over 1000 AI publications or patents, experienced 17 percent lower AI job growth between 2007 and 2019.

New research from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that venture capital investment and advanced technology adoption are closely linked to higher employment and productivity. VC-backed, technology-adopting firms account for a disproportionately large share of U.S. jobs, even as venture investment has declined since 2021.

AI isn’t destroying jobs; it’s creating them. At least in 2024, the surge in AI activity and data center construction generated more jobs than AI displaced.

Detractors of capitalism argue that it took over fifty years for the British Industrial Revolution’s benefits to reach average workers. That narrative is at best contested and, at worst, wrong.

If we’re lucky, AI will restore the productivity growth that has eluded us for 15 years—not through dystopian transformation, but through steady, incremental improvements across the economy.