Robots are performing surgery. Algorithms are underwriting insurance applications. Chatbots are drafting lesson plans and news articles. 

Work and how it gets done is changing rapidly, and some knowledge-intensive jobs may be transformed or even replaced by smart technologies. How are governments, employers and workers responding? What are the options for limiting harm as AI use grows?

These are some of the questions assistant professor of government Isabel Perera (College of Arts and Sciences) and a network of international colleagues are tackling in a research collaboration launched with a 2022 Joint Research Seed Grant from Global Cornell’s Global Hubs initiative. 

This year’s cycle of Global Hubs seed grants recently opened.

Perera’s co-PI is Andreas Kornelakis, a reader in comparative management at Kings College London (KCL), one of Cornell’s 19 Hubs partners in 11 countries across six continents. Their award for “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Occupations: Comparative Perspectives from the U.S. and the UK” set in motion a multidisciplinary research effort that now includes more than 20 scholars from institutions around the world. 

The joint grant from Cornell and KCL “really was a ‘seed,’” Perera said. “It was a small amount, but it turned out to be a powerful tool. It allowed us to do some preliminary scoping work in an area that interested us and begin to create an international, multi-institutional research community.”

That community will come together at the ILR School on September 12–13 for a conference on artificial intelligence and the future of work.

In addition to fostering a new research network, the Global Hubs seed grant also led to follow-on research funding from the Einaudi Center’s Institute for European Studies and from the ILR School, which is supporting the September conference. Network members plan to expand the research by applying for a multimillion European Research Council Synergy grant. 

The network of labor relations scholars is especially interested in the impact of AI on knowledge-intensive service sectors such as telecommunications and health care. Perera noted that in previous waves of automation, lower-skill workers were typically the most directly affected. The AI revolution seems to be different.

“It’s not like when the word processor came along and replaced all the typists,” Perera said. “Now it’s also the journalist and the doctor being replaced.”

The social, economic and political impact of that difference is hard to predict, Perera said. Knowledge workers are less likely to be unionized, but they tend to have more political influence because of their higher incomes and social status. In some cases, the threat of AI is leading knowledge workers to organize or strike, as screenwriters and actors have recently done in the United States. 

“Everything is changing quickly,” Perera said. “For researchers, this area is a moving target.” 

The pace of change is also posing challenges for governments, employers and labor and professional groups. In a May 2024 paper in the journal French Politics that came out of the project’s scoping work, Perera and government graduate student Musckaan Chauhan note that different societies approach these challenges differently. 

In the United States, the government is more inclined to protect businesses from legal hazards or regulatory interference. In the European Union, policymakers tend to focus on protecting consumers. Several European countries have developed institutions to protect workers from replacement. 

Telecommunications workers in Norway and Germany, for example, have leveraged collective voice institutions to limit workplace use of algorithmic management technologies, as a recent article by Estabrook Professor of Employment Relations and Dispute Resolution Virginia Doellgast (ILR) and other network collaborators showed.

The workplace AI project was one of 44 Joint Research and Education Seed Grants awarded in 2022. In 2023, another 44 grants were awarded for partnerships in the United Kingdom (15), Thailand (6), Australia (5), Scotland (5), Ecuador (5), China (4), Singapore (3) and Ghana (1). Topics last year ranged from autonomous vehicles and virtual reality to nutrition behavior in Bangladesh and the genomics of the Andean blueberry. 

Jonathan Miller is a freelance writer for Global Cornell.