For the first time since the 1960s, Hollywood writers and actors are on strike concurrently. One of the joint movement’s inspirations is generative artificial intelligence—the term for programs that produce humanlike text, images, audio and video more quickly and cheaply than artists. The strikers fear studios’ use of generative AI tools will replace or devalue human labor. This is a reasonable worry: one report suggests that thousands of jobs have already been lost to AI, while another estimates that hundreds of millions could eventually be automated. Left unchecked, this labor disruption could further concentrate wealth in the hands of companies and leave workers with less power than ever.

“Unfettered capitalism, unfettered innovation, does not lead to the general well-being of our society,” says Joseph E. Stiglitz, a winner of the 2001 Nobel prize in economics, a professor at Columbia University and chief economist at the Roosevelt Institute, a think tank based in New York City. “That’s one of the results that I’ve shown very strongly. So one can’t just leave it to the market.” Striking workers such as those in the writers’ and actors’ unions that are taking action now could serve as one restriction on job automation. Government regulation could also limit AI’s disruptive ability. Stiglitz, who has studied the science of inequality—and how we can reduce it—spoke with Scientific American about how artificial intelligence will impact the U.S. economy and what should be done to prevent it from increasing economic inequality.

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We may have to use government regulation because of the weakness of the bargaining power of workers—especially in the U.S. We passed the “hours and wages bill” [the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938] in the Great Depression, which capped the workweek at 40 hours. That was a long time ago, and now we’re in a new world. It may be the appropriate thing is to set it at 30 or 35, with a lot of flexibility, so if companies want to have the workers work more than that, then they pay them overtime. What we have to recognize is that we created a system where workers don’t have much bargaining power. So in that kind of world, AI may be an ally of the employer and weaken workers’ bargaining power even more, and that could increase inequality even more. There is a role for government to try to steer innovation in ways that are more productivity-increasing and job-creating, not job-destroying.

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I guess overall, I feel pessimistic—with respect to the issue of inequality. With the right policies, we could have higher productivity and less inequality, and everybody would be better off. But you might say the political economy, the way our politics have been working, has not been going in that direction. So at one end, I’m hopeful that if we did the right thing, AI would be great. But the question is: Will we be doing the right thing in our policy space? And I think that’s much more problematic.