Google rushes to Washington to promote AI employment plan before legislation: train 40k workers, collaborate with hundreds of companies to establish apprenticeship programs

ME News message. On April 14 (UTC+8), according to monitoring by 1M AI News, Google today convened representatives from the government, industry, and civil society in Washington to discuss AI and employment, and simultaneously announced three AI skills training programs:

• In partnership with the Johnson Foundation, providing tools to reduce paperwork for rural medical institutions to address labor shortages in the healthcare industry;
• In collaboration with the nonprofit Jobs for the Future, jointly establishing a new apprenticeship model with 100 companies;
• Working with the Manufacturing Institute to train 40,000 workers in AI skills, and expanding the apprenticeship model to 15 new regions across the United States.

At the meeting, MIT researcher Ben Armstrong (funded by Google) will release a study exploring how companies can leverage AI to reduce employees’ repetitive back-office tasks and promote internal collaboration.

Google’s Chief Economist, Fabien Curto Millet, said, “AI is not something that happens to us, but something we can shape.” The company has indicated support for multiple bipartisan pieces of legislation related to workforce development and the collection of data on employment impact. A clearer signal than the training programs is that Google has brought all parties together before initiating AI employment legislation in Congress, proactively putting its policy framework on the table.

The stance of the United States’ largest labor federation, AFL-CIO, is completely different: spokesperson Steve Smith said that any worker-centered AI strategy must be based on protecting workers’ rights to form unions; “otherwise, they can only leave it to the CEO to decide how to deploy AI.” AFL-CIO is currently pushing for AI labor legislation focused on state-level actions.

(Source: BlockBeats)