The economist behind the ‘China shock’ says AI is a paradoxical  ‘skill-disequalizer’ for Gen Z workers

Gen Z was promised that AI would be the great equalizer: a tool that lets a 24-year-old produce work like a veteran’s. David Autor’s latest research suggests it may do the opposite.

In a three-month experiment with patent lawyers, AI improved draft quality across the board. But when researchers took the tool away and tested independent judgment, only the experienced lawyers showed an average improvement. The juniors did not.

“Our results challenge the idea of AI being an automatic skill equalizer,” Autor said in written responses to Fortune. “Our data suggest that it’s a performance equalizer, but a skill-disequalizer, in that only practitioners who already had foundational mental models were able to level up their underlying skill sets.”

The study sorted lawyers by experience, not age. “Senior” meant seven or more years in practice, and the researchers did not study Gen Z as a group. But early-career workers are the people the findings bear on most directly.

From the China shock to AI

Autor is head of MIT’s economics department and a Google Technology and Society Visiting Fellow. He is best known for the “China shock,” developed with economists David Dorn and Gordon Hanson. Their research showed that Chinese import competition did lasting damage to American manufacturing communities, which did not adjust as smoothly as optimistic accounts of globalization predicted. In heavily exposed labor markets, wages and labor-force participation stayed depressed, and unemployment stayed elevated, for at least a decade.

More recently, Autor and Hanson have warned of a “China shock 2.0”: Chinese competition in advanced industries that threatens American technological leadership and the high-wage jobs that come with it. Some prominent economists, including Apollo Global Management’s Torsten Slok, have warned that the “AI shock” could have similarities to the China shock in terms of its impact on the U.S. labor force, with Tufts’ Bhaskar Chakravorti even coining the phrase “the wired belt” as a parallel to the rust belt.

Autor pushed back in an appearance on the Possible podcast hosted by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, saying AI “will not be, in any sense, a repeat of the China trade shock” because that was experienced by U.S. firms as a “pure negative competitive shock,” but AI will have a “very different texture” in boosting productivity.

The AI debate rests on a version of the assumption the China shock overturned: that once technology takes........

© Fortune