NEWS: Senator Blunt Rochester Presses Witnesses on AI’s Potential Benefits for Workers and Families

"You put it so perfectly, 'We need to put the needs of the public at the center of AI policy.'"

Click here to watch Senator Blunt Rochester's Remarks

U.S. Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.), a member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, today participated in a hearing on AI and its impact on American innovation and the economy. Senator Blunt Rochester's questions addressed AI's impact on the workforce and consumer protection, specifically how to understand potential benefits and harms as well as ensuring proper data collection.

Witnesses Included:

• Mr. Mike Flynn, Senior Vice President and Counsel, The Information Technology Industry Council
• Mr. David Feith, Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute
• Mr. Will Rinehart, Senior Fellow, The American Enterprise Institute
• Dr. Sarah Myers West, Co-Executive Director, AI Now

Senator Blunt Rochester's full remarks and exchange can be found here. A key excerpt is included below:

Senator Blunt Rochester: "Many news reports have come out about new entrants into the workforce, whether it's college students, women, and people of color disproportionately being impacted by or exposed to occupations most vulnerable to AI. I'm concerned that AI is moving much faster than we are, and we're not taking advantage of the disruptions or the opportunities. If you could pick one or two workforce indicators that Congress should be closely watching, what would they be?

Dr. West: "We want to look at indicators like layoffs as a frontline measure and understand how that may be disproportionately felt across the economy, I'd also look at things like employment dislocation. We've seen, for example, a number of jobs being restructured so that they're flexible or self-employed, and that also means that those workers don't have access to the same kinds of social safety net measures, and they're also dually feeling the tax burden, so that's another place that I'd be looking closely."

Mr. Rinehart: "I would focus on the unemployment rate within the AI-affected industries. There has been a whole bunch of these indices that have tried to understand job loss, potential job loss, and dislocation, and I will say that right now we're really only seeing it with entry level workers, people that are in the 20 to 25 range. I think there's actually a very good reason for that. If you're young, you don't have a lot of experience, you don't have skills, you can't show to employers that you're skilled, or that you have the kinds of things for a job. My sense of what's happening right now is that the market is becoming very noisy. We talk about this as, as a problem in matching between employer and employee. Those are the things that I'd be looking toward - the AI-affected industry and the noisiness of the of the market."