San Francisco Frontiers - California governor orders a plan to cope with AI job upheaval

Newsom's demand comes as fears grow worldwide that AI could render everyone from truck drivers to lawyers unemployed as machines learn to perform tasks that have previously required a human.

The executive order will mobilize state agencies, experts, universities and industry leaders to develop policies around severance standards, employment insurance, worker training and better tracking of hiring and layoffs in an effort to avoid nasty surprises and sudden workforce cuts.

"Businesses are going to make a fortune, and that's why you cannot continue to have a payroll tax system that taxes jobs and then subsidizes automation," the governor said in a statement.

Newsom -- who is widely expected to be a leading Democratic Party candidate in the 2028 presidential election -- said lightning fast developments in AI meant the entire employment system needed to be reimagined.

"California has never sat back and watched as the future happened to us –- and we won't start now," he said.

The move comes as figures revealed the US technology sector -- which is headquartered in California's Silicon Valley -- slashed more than 52,000 jobs in the first three months of the year, according to the firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

On Wednesday, Facebook parent Meta began laying off 8,000 people -- around 10 percent of its workforce.

Advances in AI, which have allowed for the automation of increasingly complex tasks, are often cited by companies as the reason for reducing headcounts.

But some industry watchers say firms are using the technology as a pretext for other cost-cutting.

Changes in how we work are reverberating around the world, sparking debate from Asia to Europe to the United States.

Some tech leaders -- including those at the forefront of AI, like Elon Musk and OpenAI's Sam Altman -- have suggested that the technology will leave so many people without a job that humans will effectively become creatures of leisure who need to be given some kind of basic universal income to survive.

K.Hernandez--SFF