It turns out the richest countries are actually the least likely to use AI to replace human workers compared to poorer nations.
While we fear a total job apocalypse, data shows that high-income countries tend to use AI to augment and enhance human labor rather than swap it out. This suggests the link between automation and job loss isn't a straight line, and prosperity might actually protect workers.
The Simple Macroeconomics of AI: An Empirical Test Using the Anthropic Economic Index
SSRN · 6274118
This paper provides one of the first large-scale empirical tests of Acemoglu's (2024) "Simple Macroeconomics of AI" framework using revealed-preference data from the Anthropic Economic Index v4 (November 2025). Covering 2,134 O*NET tasks across 118 countries, we test four hypotheses derived from Acemoglu's task-based model: (H1) the relationship between national income and automation intensity, (H2) whether complex tasks favor augmentation over automation, (H3) whether AI enables identification