AI Can Lead to a Fix of This Broken Government Program

This is the first of three columns about how to make the labor market more resilient in the era of AI .

America’s unemployment insurance system was designed for the workers of the 1920s, has been growing financially weaker since the 1970s, and has become less generous since the 1980s. It was so utterly inadequate during the pandemic — the most sudden and severe job loss the US has ever seen — that Congress had to build a whole new program even as it was propping up the old one.