Will AI cost jobs – and who gets the profits?

Facts as of October 11, 2026

So far there is no broad loss of jobs. But people starting out in occupations highly exposed to AI are hit first. The bigger question is still open: if models take over a growing share of value creation, who owns what they earn?

In detail

Work

A study by the Stanford Digital Economy Lab finds “no evidence of widespread, economy-wide job displacement.” But it finds something else: among 22- to 25-year-olds in occupations highly exposed to AI, employment is 19 percent below what would be expected had they kept pace with less exposed peers of the same age. Experienced workers show no such gap. The authors call this descriptive, not causal.

For Germany, the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) expects some 1.6 million jobs to be restructured within fifteen years, while the total number stays the same.

Profits

In South Korea, the presidential office's chief of policy proposed on May 11, 2026 that additional tax revenue from the AI industry be paid out to all citizens as a “national dividend”: “The fruits of the AI infrastructure era are not the outcome of individual companies alone.” The presidential office called this a private opinion; the Seoul stock exchange fell by as much as five percent at one point. It is a proposal, not policy.

Two quotes, one comparison

The Communist Manifesto of 1848 says: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” With this, Marx and Engels phrase their answer to the first industrial revolution.

On May 10, 2025, Pope Leo XIV explained his choice of name: Leo XIII, with the encyclical Rerum novarum, had taken up the social question “nel contesto della prima grande rivoluzione industriale”; today the Church offers its social teaching “per rispondere a un'altra rivoluzione industriale e agli sviluppi dell'intelligenza artificiale.” His first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, is dated May 15, 2026, the 135th anniversary of Rerum novarum.

Both statements draw the same comparison: a technology calls the distribution of work and its returns into question, and political and church thinking alike need an answer that doesn't exist yet.

In practice

Thomas J. Weiss draws a personal thesis from this, explicitly as such: today's political systems would not withstand it in the long run, because the social market economy needs many people in work. The upheaval, he says, is faster than the one in the 19th century, and the fitting system is still missing.

Sources

Brynjolfsson, Chandar, Chen: Canaries in the Coal Mine?, revised version of 12.08.2026 (accessed 11.10.2026)
IAB-Forschungsbericht 23/2025 (from research on 10.10.2026, not accessed again)
Korea Times, 12.05.2026 (accessed 11.10.2026)
Marx and Engels: Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, 1848, chapter I
Leo XIV, address to the College of Cardinals, 10.05.2025, vatican.va, Italian text (accessed 11.10.2026)
National Catholic Register, on the date of Magnifica Humanitas (accessed 11.10.2026)

Cite: Thomas J. Weiss: “Will AI cost jobs – and who gets the profits?” replicapong.de, as of October 11, 2026. https://replicapong.de/en/question/ai-jobs-and-profits/ – CC BY 4.0