Is artificial intelligence coming for California jobs? It depends | Opinion

Artificial Intelligence introduces a new problem to California: educated humans losing jobs to machines.

California is the only state in the nation studying the displacement of college-educated tech workers, many with advanced degrees, via an AI-unemployment tracker that monitors unemployment claims across the state.

In theory, the tracker will flag the jobs that humans may lose to AI. Every time someone files for unemployment, the tracker will sort lost jobs into categories based on its exposure to automation. This allows policymakers and the public to see, almost in real time, whether AI-related layoffs are actually happening and who is most at risk.

COVID-19 taught California, and the rest of the country, a hard lesson about failing to be ready when a calamity struck. With public pressure growing and graduation seniors booing commencement speakers off various stages for praising or warning of AI, California recognized the economic calamity threatened by powerful chatbots.

On Monday, for example, more than 200 economists, researchers and warned that AI could cause, “large-scale” job displacement, according to the Los Angeles Times.

“We’re worried that there’s sort of an AI pandemic in terms of job loss that might be happening, but we have just no idea. So the first step is to say, is it happening, and to whom, right? And that’s where the dashboard comes in,” said Till von Wachter, a UCLA professor and Director of the California Policy Lab.

For example, the tracker compares unemployment claims before and after the release of ChatGPT 3.5 in 2022, focusing on jobs most vulnerable to automation. According to the California Policy Lab’s tracker, highly educated workers are seeing the biggest increases in AI-related job loss.

Unemployment claims have risen for people with master’s degrees, climbed slightly for those with bachelor’s degrees, and barely changed for workers with no college degree. Looking closer, the tracker shows a persistent rise in unemployment claims from AI-exposed jobs in the Bay Area and in sectors like information technology and professional services, such as accounting, marketing, consulting and communications jobs.

The fears that these high-paying job sectors will be diminished have grown since the November 2022 release of the AI-powered chatbot known as ChatGPT.

For other groups of California workers, the impact of AI is less dramatic.

“The one big takeaway is that at the statewide level, we haven’t really seen a large increase in AI-exposed unemployment claims,” von Wachter said about the tracker’s data. “That’s exactly what you see at the national level as well.”

So what should we make of all this? Now is not the time to panic, but it’s also not the time to tune out.

“We now have unemployment claims segmented for the first time by whether they’re coming from highly AI‑exposed jobs or less AI‑exposed jobs,” von Wachter said. “That lets us track whether the number of unemployment claims from AI‑exposed jobs is starting to rise or not.”

With so much speculation about the future of work, the dashboard is designed to provide facts, not fear. It gives policymakers, researchers, and workers real data to guide decisions, grounding the conversation in evidence rather than assumptions.

While the tracker can’t stop automation, it gives California’s leaders a chance to respond before small trends become big problems.

If California and the rest of the country want to weather whatever storm AI may bring, this kind of early-warning system is essential. The real challenge is to use these insights wisely: respond to signals, don’t just react to headlines, and don’t wait for disaster.

Preparedness isn’t just a talking point; it’s the difference between a manageable transition and a crisis.