M29.7 CONNECT THE MECHANISM
Assess labor, access, resources, and accountability across the lifecycle
Will AI take your job, drain the power grid, or copy your book? Work out the real numbers yourself, and learn to tell the evidence from the headlines.
LESSON OVERVIEW14 min lesson
Lesson overview
Will AI take your job, drain the power grid, or copy your book? Work out the real numbers yourself, and learn to tell the evidence from the headlines.
What you’ll explore
- AI’s social effects depend on how systems are built, governed, and used; assess distribution of benefits and costs, provenance, resource accounting, and mechanisms for accountability.
GO TO THE SOURCE
Original explanations, connected to the research.
GPTs are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of Large Language Models (Eloundou, Manning, Mishkin & Rock, 2023)Generative AI at Work (Brynjolfsson, Li & Raymond, 2023)Energy and AI (International Energy Agency, April 2025)Measuring the environmental impact of delivering AI at Google Scale (Google, August 2025)The Gentle Singularity (Sam Altman, June 2025)Copyright and Artificial Intelligence (US Copyright Office)Facts and Figures 2024 (International Telecommunication Union)Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security (Chesney & Citron, 2019)Green AI (Schwartz et al., 2019)On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots (Bender et al., 2021)NIST AI Risk Management FrameworkSuggest a correction
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