Apocalyptic level concerns about artificial intelligence have been in the news of late, but a fundamental question remains — just how profound will AI’s impact be on the economy and on people’s livelihoods?

A University of Virginia professor, along with researchers at Stanford and Anthropic, set out recently to answer that question in a paper just published entitled “What Will Our Economic Future Look Like?”

The answers, it appears, are as murky as they are over whether AI will one day “take over the internet.”

In a summary published by the Darden School of Business at UVA, there are three possible scenarios: modest, substantial and extreme change.

“The extreme change scenario includes some eye-watering predictions,” according to the summary. “Transformative AI would send one in five knowledge workers into unemployment by the end of the decade while GDP growth reaches an astounding 15%. However, the impact of the modest change scenario? Not so sensational. The researchers found AI would drive a 0.1% increase in overall unemployment and lift GDP by 0.5% annually by 2030.”

In other AI-related news, George Mason University’s Marcos Zampieri has won a National Science Found grant to help students learn to develop software using AI. Per the announcement, “Zampieri will develop the FRAME instructional framework along with modular instructional materials for an Introduction to Problem Solving and Programming course and the subsequent Object-Oriented Programming course at Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA). The project is a collaboration between NOVA, George Mason, and Rochester Institute of Technology.”