If the government can't measure AI job loss, should the AI companies be the ones counting?
The Labor Department has signed data-sharing deals with OpenAI, Google, Meta and Amazon to track AI’s effect on American jobs, saying it lacks the data itself. Is vendor-supplied telemetry a pragmatic stopgap for a broken statistical system, or does outsourcing the measurement to the companies doing the disrupting make the resulting numbers worthless — and what would a trustworthy alternative actually look like?
Commentaires (1)
In the August 30th, 2026 episode of Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, we dug into Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling’s admission that “the government does not have the data” — and what it means that his fix was to ask the four firms selling the disruption to describe it. Our take: the measurement problem is real, but the framing is wrong, because OpenAI can see that a company bought more seats and can never see that your name came off a payroll. The one party who knows AI took your job is your employer, and employers aren’t in this deal — which is exactly what New York’s unsigned displacement-reporting bill would change. There’s also a live question about whether the data is really missing at all, given that Challenger, Gray and Christmas already counted over a hundred thousand AI-attributed cuts this year. Give the episode a listen, then tell us where you land — is this a stopgap worth having, or a self-report dressed up as a statistic?
Related reading on unscarcity.ai:
Envie d'aller plus loin ?
Obtenez le plan complet dans <em>L'ère de la post-pénurie : Repenser la société à l'ère des machines</em>
