Human capital and machine intelligence

Do more educated workers gain more from AI? Using 620,000 U.S. workers and a task-based measure of how exposed each industry is to artificial intelligence, our new study finds that the payoff to education is meaningfully higher where AI runs deepest: a year of schooling returns about 10.4 percent in the most AI-exposed industries versus 9.3 percent in the least, a gap that holds up under demanding statistical tests, survives alternative exposure measures, and is almost certainly understated by the coarseness of the data. Since ChatGPT's arrival in late 2022, that gap shows early signs of widening, more so for men and for college graduates and concentrated in the industries where AI exposure is greatest, though with only two years of post-AI data the movement is suggestive rather than conclusive. The wage structure, in other words, is starting to bend the way the "AI complements skill" hypothesis predicts, and the next few years of data will tell us how far. Read the paper here.