The US government wants to force companies to report how many people have been fired because of artificial intelligence

When you buy from our articles through links, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.

A bipartisan bill could provide a step in the right direction for workers’ rights in the age of AI, calling for further research “regarding artificial intelligence-related employment impacts” (via The Verge). The AI-Related Job Impacts Clarity Act will require both publicly traded companies and government organizations to report to the Department of Labor how many employees they have laid off as a result of AI automation. The law also requires companies to track how many people they hire or retrain as a result of AI integration.

Concerns about what AI means for the workforce are widespread. For example, last month the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, which represents 15 million workers and 63 unions, issued a report calling for a “worker-centered technological future.”

The most recent bill was introduced by Democratic Senator Mark Warner and Republican Senator Josh Hawley. Senator Warner said, “Good policy starts with good data. This bipartisan legislation will finally give us a clear picture of AI’s impact on the workforce: which jobs are being cut, which workers are being retrained, and where new opportunities are emerging.”

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has previously said that he expects jobs in a number of areas, such as customer support, to one day be “completely, totally gone” because of AI. Meanwhile, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang emphasizes that “the craft segment of every economy will boom.” He also told Channel 4 News: “If you’re an electrician, if you’re a plumber, if you’re a carpenter, we need hundreds of thousands. To build all these factories.”

As unintentionally bleak as this sounds, we shouldn’t have to rely on rumors from tech CEOs; the data collected through this latest U.S. government law should provide a more definitive picture in an upcoming report. But that said, it feels increasingly impossible to escape AI’s long shadow, no matter who you are.

For example, while Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said in August that replacing entry-level jobs with AI was “the stupidest thing he’d ever heard,” more recent organizational changes have led to the broader company laying off 14,000 corporate positions. This feels especially grim as many major AI players have become increasingly reliant on AWS’s server power. Just this week, OpenAI and Amazon closed a $38 billion deal.

With such eye-watering amounts of money being thrown around in the name of computing power, it’s hard not to feel like human workers are being left out in the cold. But who knows, maybe this latest law shows a renewed commitment to workers’ rights at some level within the US government, and maybe… just maybethey can be brought in against the cold.