The question behind AI panic: What happens to me if it works?

Christoph Trattner, a professor of information science at the University of Bergen and founding director of SFI MediaFutures, a Norwegian research center for responsible media technology, argues that much of the anxiety around workplace AI comes down to one question: what happens to me if it works? His point is that the problem is not that people cannot use the tools. It is that demonstrating how much faster they can work with AI may be exactly how their jobs get smaller.

He points to a recent Norwegian response. On October 2, the Norwegian government and eight employer and union organizations signed an AI agreement that runs through 2029. It calls for employees to be involved when AI is introduced, using rights they already have, and for the gains from AI to benefit workers as well as businesses and society.

Trattner places this approach in a longer history. In the early 1970s, computer scientist Kristen Nygaard worked with Norway's Iron and Metal Workers' Union on how computers were brought into workplaces. Their project helped establish participatory design, the practice of involving the people who will actually use a system in decisions about it.

The piece frames the new agreement as a continuation of that tradition: worker involvement and shared benefit as the way to address fears that AI success could come at employees' expense. The text available here is only an excerpt, so the full argument and any further detail on how the agreement would work in practice are not covered.