Last week, New Jersey became the first state in the nation to ask its workforce for their views on how generative AI (GenAI) will change work, our workplaces, and the skills we need to succeed.
GenAI has an enormous potential to make our jobs easier and more productive and create new jobs. At the same time, GenAI could also create challenges from eroding job quality to eliminating jobs altogether. To enable policies and programs that respond to communities’ concerns, it is crucial for public institutions to understand how residents expect technology to change how we work.
That’s why, with our help, New Jersey’s AI Task Force is using the collective intelligence tool All Our Ideas, to ask workers to share their greatest hopes and concerns about the impact of GenAI on work in the Garden State. All Our Ideas is an innovative online engagement tool used to create a rank-ordered list based on public input. Instead of having to answer a long list of questions, respondents are shown two answer choices in response to the question: “Over the next five years, what will be the biggest effect from generative AI on the workforce in New Jersey?”
Participants select between pairs of statements as many or as few times as they wish. The answer choices cover a range of challenges including job displacement, economic instability and threats to worker power. The statements also include opportunities such as the potential of AI to create new job opportunities, make work more meaningful, and aid in job matching and career development.
As responses come in, the tool creates a rank-ordered list showing the most selected and least selected answer choices in real time. Public input will help the State to understand what respondents see as the greatest opportunities and risks.
Following the engagement, the Task Force will develop policy recommendations that respond to the public’s greatest concerns using the AI-based toolkit Policy Synth. Developed by the GovLab and Citizens Foundation, Policy Synth leverages AI agents to conduct large-scale automated web research in order to rapidly develop a set of solutions to urgent public problems. The output will be a set of evidence-based policy recommendations for how New Jersey can address AI-driven impacts on the state’s economy and workforce. The recommendations will also be informed by learnings from a survey of New Jersey’s public sector workforce which asked public servants about their knowledge, attitudes and interests around AI.
“AI and You” is the latest in a series of public consultations that the GovLab has helped to design or facilitate using the All Our Ideas tool, including:
-
Unlocking Literacy (2023-2024): Facilitated a national engagement to understand perspectives on the causes of low literacy in support of the Chief of Teaching and Learning for Boston Public Schools and Boston’s Museum of Science.
-
Our Turn Student Agenda (2023): Provided training and guidance to support education advocacy group Our Turn in engaging students across the country to understand how young people want to see the education system change.
-
Alignment Assemblies on AI (2023): Supported the Collective Intelligence Project in its efforts to ask the US public what to measure and mitigate when it comes to risks and harms of large language models (LLMs).
-
Your Education, Your Voice (2021): Facilitated two engagements with students, caregivers, and educators to understand the greater opportunities and needs when it comes to education. One engagement, in partnership with the Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation, was national in scope; a parallel engagement was focused on New Jersey in support of the State’s Department of Education.
-
Your Future of Work (2020): Supported New Jersey’s Future of Work Task Force in asking individuals to share their greatest concerns about the impact of new technology on skills and Lifelong Learning, worker rights and benefits, and worker health and safety.
-
Big Health Data (2020): Worked with AARP – the nation’s largest nonprofit – to facilitate a consultation to understand its members’ concerns about institutions’ collection and use of health, wellness and lifestyle data.
The GovLab is dedicated to helping governments, philanthropies, community organizations, and other institutions to use All Our Ideas and other innovative tools to engage communities in collaborative problem solving. To that end, we are proud to be working with Citizens Foundation to support the continuing development of the open source All Our Ideas platform.
New Jersey’s “AI and You” engagement will run from July 24th through August 7th, 2024. Participation is voluntary, anonymous, available in English and Spanish, and open to all workers in New Jersey. To learn more, visit: https://innovation.nj.gov/ai-and-you/
