Americans are facing a rapid transition to an AI economy with a safety net that has barely entered the 21st century. That’s fueling an AI backlash as workers worry that their jobs will be automated away, and there won’t be a backstop to catch them. Preparing for disruption requires that we actually listen to the Americans who will bear the consequences. CSAIP’s research offers an essential window into what Americans are actually asking for as they confront growing economic uncertainty fueled by AI. Our recent national survey of 56,000 Americans tells us that the public wants to see bold policies to rebuild the social safety net before disruption hits.
The safety net we have today won’t bail us out of widespread AI disruption
Even before AI began to raise the prospect of widescale economic displacement, our social safety net was failing to effectively deliver economic security.
Let’s look at unemployment insurance (UI), the stalwart New Deal program that forms an essential part of the social safety net. Even before AI, UI was in crisis. It had failed workers in the transition to a gig economy. The share of unemployed workers who actually receive UI has fallen to just one in four, driven in large part by the growing share of workers who are classified by their employers as independent contractors. Benefits are too low to keep people financially stable, and assistance is time-limited. The program is administered through a miserably complex patchwork of state laws that make the benefits extremely difficult to carry across state lines if you’re trying to relocate to find a new job. And the program basically denies help to any recent college graduate who cannot find work but also doesn’t have a work history.
Put simply, today’s UI is not capable of absorbing even a modest level of AI related job disruption. That’s ominous, because UI is ostensibly the most important safety net program for an era in which automation may swell the ranks of the unemployed, millions of Americans may need to shift careers, and young workers are already graduating into an economy where entry-level opportunities are shrinking.
But UI is not an outlier. Many of the most important safety net programs are built around the assumption that most Americans can find work that will sustain them. Medicaid and food stamps? Locked behind work requirements. Social Security? Tied to your lifetime wages. The social contract between the American welfare state and the American people assumes deregulated labor markets will expand prosperity, and provides inadequate help for the people who can’t cut it in the private market. But a safety net built around the primacy of work is set up to fail when the future of work itself is shifting under our feet. Our social safety net is profoundly ill-equipped to provide economic security if automation upends our working lives.
So we have a social safety net that is structurally misaligned with the direction our economy may be heading. The question for policymakers now is how do we harness a moment of rupture and outrage to finally transform the safety net for a 21st century economy?
AI economic policy should start with listening
This is where real-time, iterative public opinion testing becomes so valuable. Practically speaking, we need to be clear-eyed about which policies are popular enough to have a viable political pathway. But there’s a principled reason, too. As AI continues to tip the balance of power in our economy and democracy towards an emerging tech oligarchy, we should pay extra care to ground any AI policy agenda in the aspirations, fears, and opinions of the American public instead of the oligarchs’ vision of a post-AGI utopia.
CSAIP recently polled 56,000 Americans on their views on potential AI economic policies. You can access the data and learn more about our polling methods here. This poll is a treasure trove for policymakers: it tests baseline public opinion on 79 economic policy ideas for managing the AI transition. And it shows that public opinion is, once again, way ahead of the policy process.
What we’re hearing: Americans broadly support bold progressive policies to protect people from AI displacement
CSAIP’s data shows that the public is demanding a new economic vision for a world fundamentally transformed by AI. Americans overwhelmingly support dozens of policies to redistribute the gains of AI and to protect workers and families from economic displacement. The good news for policymakers is that Americans seem open to a wide range of policy tools: progressive taxation of AI profits and wealth, a stronger safety net to help workers impacted by automation, expanded investments in workforce development, and new ownership and governance models.
People want to be workers in the AI economy
Here’s what jumps out to me in this poll: The policies that appear to resonate most deeply with Americans speak to their aspirations to be workers and owners in an economy that AI is transforming, generally outperforming policies that are untethered to work.
The most popular policies in CSAIP’s poll center around protecting employment and ownership: expanding apprenticeships in new fields shaped by AI (+66pp), providing retraining or severance pay for automated-away jobs (+63pp), delivering sector-based job training in high-demand fields (+60pp), and creating employee stock ownership plans to give workers an ownership stake in the companies they work for (+50pp). In fact, the most popular policy in this survey expands apprenticeships in new fields that work alongside AI. So while Americans are anxious about the AI transition, they also want policies that deal them into a changing economy and ensure they’re not left behind.
By contrast, policies that expand access to benefits but don’t emphasize work were repeatedly underwater in this poll. A universal basic income policy ranks second to last at -33pp. Even a proposal to provide guaranteed income only to workers who have specifically lost a job to AI underperforms at -20pp. For those of us who believe expanding access to cash assistance is an important way to modernize the social safety net, these findings reflect a public skepticism we haven’t overcome yet.
The poll also raises big policy questions. We have been told a federal jobs program is politically impossible. That just doesn’t appear to be true. A proposal to create a modern version of a Works Progress Administration jobs program to employ workers who lost their job to AI scores an approval margin of +32pp. How can we design policy to match the public appetite for a program like this? At the same time, a proposal to expand paid apprenticeship programs scores an even higher approval margin of +66pp. These programs offer something similar to workers who are worried about being left behind in a changing economy. So why does one policy design command even higher public support?
An uphill battle for the boldest policies
Our poll found that strengthening programs that Americans are already familiar with sometimes outperforms novel policies that would establish new systems of redistribution. Support for policies that strengthen familiar programs like food stamps and disability insurance were more resilient against the opposition’s argument than proposals that ask Americans to trust something new, like a social wealth fund or AI profit windfall taxes.
One explanation for this dynamic is that trust in government is very low, and Americans may not believe that bold policies can actually be delivered well. Another explanation is that because the AI transition sparks deep anxieties about rapid change, programs that feel familiar and predictable may seem preferable to policies that themselves promise radical change.
But this dynamic should raise alarms for those of us who worry that the safety net we have today, even if improved, is not structurally up to the task of delivering security and prosperity. What this poll shows us is that there may be a mismatch between the baseline comfort that Americans feel with status quo programs (even programs that already underperform!) and the need for policies that are proportionate to the scale of the disruption we may face. How we avoid falling into a familiarity trap will be a key test for safety net redesign in an AI economy.
Sparking a new social contract
What an era of disruption calls for is not just pumping up the existing programs we have; AI may well demand that we reimagine the foundations of our social contract. In the most prosperous nation on earth, economic security should be a birthright, not conditional on the decisions corporations make about the future of work. And if the AI revolution does in fact usher in the wealth and productivity that its boosters promise, that should catalyze deep reinvestments in our social safety net so that this prosperity is shared. If this moment of transition is to become a moment of transformation, we’ll need an ongoing practice of listening and testing our ideas with the public.
