A group of 40 economists are calling on the federal government to bolster its efforts to collect employment data related to artificial intelligence.
The move comes amid a leadership shake up at the country’s leading agency tasked with overseeing how the federal government collects and analyzes data related to the economy. President Trump last month fired Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner Erika McEntarfar, following a number of disappointing jobs reports, sparking concerns that the moves could further erode trust in the agency.
The open letter to Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer was drafted in partnership with the Americans for Responsible Innovation, a nonprofit advocacy organization, focused on emerging technologies like artificial intelligence.
“We urge the Department of Labor to make collecting and providing high-quality and timely data for monitoring AI’s impact on labor markets a top priority,” the letter’s subject reads.
The letter’s release also comes as two signatories—economists studying AI’s impact on private employment—published key findings, among them that early-career workers are the most exposed to AI; although employment continues to grow “robustly” overall, younger workers face particularly stagnant conditions, and increased AI uses does not always correlate with job loss.
“We’re in a period, I think, of increasing turbulence in the economy due to AI and other things,” said one of the study’s authors, Erik Brynjolfsson, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. “It could easily become even more chaotic in the coming months and years, so we absolutely need to get better data. We don’t want to be flying blind into this.”
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The economists called on the agency to ramp up data collection and analysis of data that is “granular and timely” in order to react to the new challenges and changes that may arise as widespread AI adoption in the workplace grows.
The letter calls on the department to invest in and improve upon the datasets available for researchers studying economic phenomena related to AI adoption, so that they offer more insight into how the technology may affect the jobs market, and how policymakers can prepare for those changes.
“It’s one of the most cost effective investments the government can make. It’s a public good that we should absolutely be investing in,” Brynjolfsson said. “That’s why I signed that letter.”
Private datasets are “not fully representative,” he added.
The aforementioned paper Brynjolfsson coauthored on early AI impacts leverages only the private employment data from ADP, the largest payroll software provider in the country.
“Ultimately, government data and private data,” he added. “I see them as complements more than substitutes.”