The AI Jobs Panic Comes to Sacramento
California has seen the future of work, and Sacramento’s first instinct is to convene 14 task forces about it.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Executive Order N-6-26 today, setting California’s workforce agencies in motion on directives involving research reviews, revisions to the state’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, studies of new safety-net programs, a review of collective bargaining frameworks, an employment dashboard, and—near the end—a study of programs that would redirect artificial intelligence (AI) company revenues toward state-selected applications.
The animating concern is AI-driven labor disruption. Newsom’s order treats that disruption as sufficiently imminent to justify building new regulatory infrastructure across California’s workforce apparatus.
The empirical literature suggests that concern is running well ahead of the evidence. That includes a literature review published by the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) that I co-authored with Kristian Stout.