labor-market-friction
Structural barriers like skills gaps, geographic immobility, and identity attachment to certain jobs hinder workers' ability to transition amid automation-driven displacement.
1 chapter across 1 book
The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma (2023)Mustafa Suleyman; Michael Bhaskar
This chapter argues that AI's improvement rate far exceeds exponential growth, enabling machines to replicate diverse human skills and creating new job categories while simultaneously displacing many existing roles. The labor market faces significant friction due to skills mismatch, geographic immobility, and identity tied to work, leading to widespread job insecurity, economic disruption, and strained public finances globally. These labor market disruptions act as amplifiers of societal fragility, weakening nation-states and transforming the foundational structures of society through a pervasive redistribution of power driven by a general-purpose technological revolution.