The Impacts of Artificial Intelligence on Education, the Labor Market, and Social Structure: An Interdisciplinary Literature Review

Öz

The rapid diffusion of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has generated a large and fragmented body of scholarship spanning education, economics, and sociology. This paper offers an interdisciplinary literature review that synthesizes research on three interconnected domains: the integration of AI into teaching and learning, the transformation of labor markets through automation and augmentation, and the broader implications of AI for social structure and inequality. Drawing on foundational and recent studies, the review traces how AI is reshaping instructional practice and educational governance, how it is displacing certain categories of routine work while creating new task demands elsewhere, and how these shifts interact with existing patterns of social stratification. The review identifies three recurring themes across the literature: the tension between AI's potential to personalize and democratize opportunity and its capacity to reproduce or amplify existing inequalities; the persistent gap between optimistic policy discourse and the empirical evidence on classroom and labor-market outcomes; and the underdeveloped state of interdisciplinary dialogue between education researchers, economists, and sociologists studying the same technological transformation from different vantage points. The paper concludes by outlining directions for future research that more explicitly integrate these three literatures.