When my mother turned 70, she had a unique birthday wish. Instead of a party or a cake, she told our family she needed our help to open a transitional home for survivors of domestic violence and their children.

She saw this birthday present as the culmination of a lifetime spent fighting for survivors of abuse, a journey that began back in the 1970s when it was commonplace to use terms like “battered women,” and survivors had few places to turn. A few months after my mom’s birthday, the Kathleen Mary House opened its doors — named in honor of her mother, Kathleen Mary, a survivor of domestic abuse.

When I was born, my mother gave me the name Kathleen Mary, and her lifelong activism on behalf of survivors made a huge impact on me. The effects of domestic violence are not limited to a single generation, nor should our vigilance against it be. That is just one reason I’m so concerned about the outcome of an upcoming Supreme Court case, United States v. Rahimi, which next year will decide whether to uphold a gun safety law that protects survivors of domestic violence.

The Supreme Court recently announced plans to take up the Rahimi case, which will most likely rely on the court’s recent Second Amendment decision, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. In that case, a majority led by Justice Clarence Thomas overturned New York’s concealed carry law that had been on the books for more than a century — claiming 21st-century gun laws should be consistent with an earlier time, when muskets were common firearms.

In doing so, the court stripped away a critical tool I had as governor to keep New Yorkers safe. In New York, we quickly responded with actions to try to prevent more deadly firearms than ever from flooding our communities, our businesses, our bars and restaurants and even our crowded subway cars. One stray word, or sharp elbow, could immediately have devastating, life-threatening consequences.

Now, in Rahimi, the Supreme Court will decide whether deadly firearms can flood the homes of domestic violence survivors. The case arrives at the court after a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in favor of abusers. The appeals court decided that government cannot prevent an abusive individual, against whom a court has issued a domestic violence protective order, from possessing a deadly firearm.

By striking down a federal law aimed at protecting survivors of abuse, the appeals court put forth an outrageous legal theory that claims individuals with domestic violence orders have a constitutional right to possess a gun. Using Justice Thomas’s historically focused argument from Bruen as precedent, the Supreme Court could rule that domestic violence survivors today deserve only the protections they had in the 18th century — a time before most women could own property or work outside the home, let alone vote.

The stakes could not be higher. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey indicates that about 41 percent of women and 26 percent of men in the United States have experienced sexual violence, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner and reported being affected by it during their lifetime. According to U.S. crime reports, about one in five homicide victims is killed by an intimate partner, and over half of female homicide victims are killed by a current or former male intimate partner.

Here in New York, there are approximately 80,000 serious offenses such as assaults, sex offenses and violations of orders of protection each year across the state, and data shows that in New York approximately one in five homicides is related to domestic violence.

The Supreme Court has a choice: It can lean into the dangerous Fifth Circuit theory that guns cannot be regulated for the purpose of protecting survivors of domestic violence, or it can uphold federal law that keeps guns out of the hands of dangerous individuals.

Before oral arguments are heard, there’s no way to tell which way the Supreme Court will rule. The precedent set by Bruen is extraordinarily troubling. Yet even within the court’s majority in Bruen, there was a split. Justice Thomas kept his focus on historical arguments. But a concurrence by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in which Chief Justice John Roberts joined, left room for certain basic protections, noting that “properly interpreted, the Second Amendment allows a ‘variety’ of gun regulations.”

This concurrence helped inform New York’s response to Bruen. After New York State’s century-old gun law was overturned, I took immediate steps to restore protections from gun violence, including signing new laws to strengthen training and gun licensing requirements. In the spring of 2022, we bolstered our state’s red flag laws, getting guns away from people like domestic abusers who pose a risk to themselves or others and closing loopholes that made the tragedies in Buffalo and in Uvalde, Texas, possible. As a result, courts have issued roughly 9,000 extreme-risk orders of protection in the past year, up from 1,400 in the preceding two and a half years.

Depending on the scope of the court’s decision in Rahimi, these protections could be at risk as well. After a brief spike during the start of the pandemic in 2020, New York is gradually and steadily returning to prepandemic shooting levels and has one of the five lowest rates of firearm-related deaths. I’ve always said public safety is my top priority as governor, and I’m committed to using every tool at my disposal to keep our communities safe from gun violence.

An extreme, out-of-control Supreme Court put gun safety laws at risk in Bruen. Across America, survivors of domestic abuse will now wait in fear to see whether Justice Kavanaugh and his colleagues deem laws that protect survivors to “properly” interpret the Constitution.

I can only imagine what my late mother would say about these judicial attacks on survivors of abuse. But in her honor, and on behalf of all New Yorkers, I’ll never stop fighting for justice.

The workers were furious. Believing that new mechanical looms threatened their jobs, they broke into factories, seized machinery, brought it into the street and set it afire, all with widespread public support, even tacitly from the authorities.

That was in 1675. And those English textile workers were neither first nor last in the long procession of worriers about the potential harm to jobs from labor-saving devices. Several centuries earlier, the adoption of the fulling mill caused an uproar among workers forced to find other occupations. Almost exactly 60 years ago, Life magazine warned that the advent of automation would make “jobs go scarce” — instead, employment boomed.

Now, the launch of ChatGPT and other generative A.I. platforms has unleashed a tsunami of hyperbolic fretting, this time about the fate of white-collar workers. Will paralegals — or maybe even a chunk of lawyers — be rendered superfluous? Will A.I. diagnose some medical conditions faster and better than doctors? Will my next guest essay be ghostwritten by a machine? A breathless press has already begun chronicling the first job losses.

Unlike most past rounds of technological improvement, the advent of A.I. has also birthed a small armada of non-economic fears, from disinformation to privacy to the fate of democracy itself. Some suggest in seriousness that A.I. could have a more devastating impact on humanity than nuclear war.

While acknowledging the need for substantive guardrails, I’ll leave those valid concerns to others. When it comes to the economy, including jobs, the reassuring lessons of history (albeit with a few warning signals) are inescapable. At the moment, the problem is not that we have too much technology; it’s that we have too little.

We’ve had forms of artificial intelligence, broadly defined, for millenniums. The abacus, thought to have been invented in Babylonia more than 4,000 years ago, replaced more laborious methods of mathematical calculation, saving time and therefore reducing work.

When I began my career in finance in the early 1980s, we had only hand-held calculators to help with our numerical analysis, which we painstakingly wrote in pencil on large sheets of paper (hence the term “spreadsheets”) and which were then typed by a secretarial pool. Any changes meant redoing the entire spreadsheet. Now, all that happens with the click of a mouse.

Less than three decades ago, library-type research could require hours of combing through dusty volumes; now, it necessitates a few strokes on a keyboard. Not surprisingly, the number of librarians has been flat since 1990, while total employment has grown by more than 40 percent.

Other job categories have almost completely disappeared. When was the last time you talked to a telephone operator? Or were conveyed by a manned elevator? In the place of these and so many other defunct tasks, a vast array of new categories has been created. A recent study co-authored by M.I.T. economist David Autor found that approximately 60 percent of jobs in 2018 were in occupations that didn’t exist in 1940.

And so the Great American Jobs Machine ground on. In the decade after Life magazine decried the robot invasion, the United States created 20.2 million jobs, and today, the unemployment rate sits at 3.6 percent, a hair above its 50-year low. Of course, the number of Americans employed in finance has boomed, even as computers, Excel and other technologies have made them far more productive.

Higher worker productivity translates into higher wages and cheaper goods, which become more purchasing power, which stimulates more consumption, which induces more production, which creates new jobs. That, essentially, is how growth has always happened.

This makes A.I. a must-have, not just a nice-to-have. We can only achieve lasting economic progress and rising standards of living by increasing how much each worker produces. Technology — whether in the form of looms or robots or artificial intelligence — is central to that objective.

Generative A.I. — as dazzling and scary as it can be because of its potential to be a particularly transformative innovation — is just another step in the continuum of progress. Were our ancestors any less startled when they first witnessed other exceptional inventions, like a telephone transmitting voice or a light bulb illuminating a room?

In the heyday of commercial innovation — between 1920 and 1970 — productivity rose at a 2.8 percent annual rate. Since then, except for a brief interval of acceleration between 1995 and 2005 (the modern computer revolution), the annual rate of growth has averaged a modest 1.6 percent. To pessimists, that reflects their view that the most impactful technological advances are behind us. To me, that means full speed ahead on A.I.

What constitutes “full speed ahead” remains to be seen. For all those who believe that A.I. will prove revolutionary, there are others more skeptical that it will prove a game changer. My best guess is that it will help nudge productivity upward but not back to its halcyon days of the last century.

To be sure, the benefits of productivity growth don’t always reach workers as fully and efficiently as we’d like. Recently, even the meager productivity growth has largely not filtered down to the workers. Since 1990, labor efficiency has risen by 84 percent, but average real (adjusted for inflation) hourly compensation has increased by 56 percent.

That foregone worker compensation has largely gone into corporate profits, fueling a stock market boom and record income inequality. Why the disconnect? There are a variety of contributors, from declining union membership to imports to anti-labor practices by companies, like noncompete clauses for hourly workers.

Government can help ameliorate these dislocations. For more than a century, redistribution — yes, that can be a dirty word in America — has been a necessary part of managing the fruits of the industrial and technological improvements.

The progressive income tax, introduced in 1913, was designed, in part, to offset the vast income inequality generated during the Gilded Age. More factory improvements and more income inequality in the 1920s helped stimulate a variety of New Deal policies, from additional protection for labor to the introduction of Social Security.

Today, we can easily see the consequences of Washington’s failure to hold up its end of the bargain. Disgruntled white factory workers in the Midwest with stagnant or falling real wages became supporters of Donald Trump (despite the fact that his policies favored the wealthy). With only 22 percent of Americans saying our country is on the right track, America feels more divided politically and socially than at any time in my 70-year lifetime.

We did a lousy job of preparing Americans for the transition from a manufacturing economy to one dominated by services. We have to do a better job this time.

If artificial intelligence proves as transformative as its acolytes (and some antagonists) believe, we could face a vast need for better education and training. The impact will not be just on factory workers but on Americans across industries and up and down the employment chain, from financial analysts and coders to graphic designers and customer service agents and call-center workers.

A recent report from Goldman Sachs, among the most bullish of the techno-bulls, concluded that A.I. can help return our productivity growth rate to the halcyon days of the mid-20th century. I, for one, am fervently hoping that the Goldman report proves correct and that A.I. unleashes a new era of technological and economic progress — and that we take the right steps to be sure the rewards are widely shared.