6 Questions Shaping AI

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today we are discussing the six big questions that are shaping AI. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
And today, we are discussing six big questions shaping AI. This is sort of a quintessential weekend long read slash big think episode. And a good way to sum up the high level before I land back in the office chair next week, after a week of being away. The six questions that I'm going to discuss are, one, how much job displacement will there actually be? Two, to what extent AI becomes a political issue and in what ways? Three, who gets to decide the limits of how AI gets used? Four, how deep the market's pockets are for the infrastructure build out and how much external factors will impact that? Five, how fast will differentiated enterprise adoption compound? And six, just how much agency do agents really give people? Are we on the verge of a wave of the greatest flourishing of small business entrepreneurship that we've ever seen? Let's start with what certainly has been one of the dominant public discussions. How much job displacement will there actually be? Now, one of the things that makes this conversation potent right now is that we have a tricky combination of one, some very real announcements, but two, those announcements being nascent enough that we don't know for sure how much we can extrapolate them out, meaning effectively that our imaginations about the possibilities of job displacement are running wild with just enough nascent evidence to really feed into those fears. And of course, it's not just a block and other layoff announcements. A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that out of a survey of 750 chief financial officers from US firms, about 44% said that they plan on some AI-related job cuts. Although as Fortune points out, while the number of estimated job cuts from that survey will be nine times higher than the AI-related job cuts last year, the total number is still expected to be a tiny fraction, just 0.4% of all roles, of some of the doomsday predictions out there. And the doomsday predictions are flourishing right now. Senator Mark Warner recently suggested that new college graduate employment will spike to 30% plus in the next couple of years. Dario Amadei continues to sound off about the idea that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within the next three years. Basically, you can't really throw a stick without hitting some prognostication about how we're all gonna lose our jobs. Now, obviously I did a whole long show about my optimism and why I don't think, A, AI is going to take our jobs, and frankly, the will AI take our jobs conversation is even the right one to be having. And what's encouraging to me is that we're finally starting to see a bit of a counter discussion. Chicago Booth's Alex Imas and Harvard fellow Symmetra Shukla recently dropped a blog post called How Will AI-Driven Automation Actually Affect Jobs? Now, this is not some full-throated argument that AI isn't going to cause disruptions, but a reminder that simple exposure to AI is not really the critical thing. In a summary post on Twitter, Alex writes, AI exposure measures are not meant to predict displacement or job automation. Exposure can lead to job loss or it can lead to more hiring and higher wages. It all depends on how 1 Automated tasks interact with non-automated tasks i.e. to what extent they are compliments, 2 How consumer demand in that sector responds to prices i.e. elasticity of consumer demand, and 3 The dimensionality of the job i.e. the number of tasks a job has. Even more optimistic is this recent report from Lenny Rzocicki of Lenny's Podcasts and Lenny's Newsletter called State of the Product Job Market in Early 2026 Lenny writes, In spite of the headlines about layoffs and AI taking jobs, we're actually seeing a lot of promising signs in tech hiring, and some interesting new trends. Product manager openings are at the highest level we've seen in over three years. AI hasn't slowed the demand for software engineers at least not yet. 3 AI roles in general are absolutely exploding. And then 7 Yes, we're skipping a couple. Despite ongoing layoffs, the overall number of tech jobs continues to grow. And I anticipate that over time, there will start to be more focus on where new jobs will actually come from. For example, a recent Goldman Sachs report analyzed how AI would shift the job market. It found that AI could automate tasks that make up about 25% of work hours in the US, and that around that, roughly 6 to 7% of workers might face displacement. However, the report also points out that the technology will create entirely new categories of work. For example, just the physical infrastructure for AI is going to require massive labor. They point out that the US alone needs 500,000 new workers by December 30th to handle electric power demands. Since October of 2022, construction jobs related to data centers have already grown by 216,000. The AI companies themselves, despite being some of the leaders in how to use AI, are still planning on growing. OpenAI apparently plans to double their workforce to 8,000 by the end of this year. And even the ECB has found that the companies that are most AI native right now are actually hiring more than they're firing. It makes sense to me that alongside this major jumping capabilities, there are major renewed conversations and fears around job displacement. But I am hopeful and encouraged that in the months to come, I think the conversation about those effects will get a little bit less black and white and a little bit more nuanced and varied. Now, of course, quite related to the job conversation is to what extent AI becomes a political issue and in what ways. There are a few different ways in which AI could become a political issue. There are issues of X-risk and runaway takeoff AI that threatens human life. There are the more here and now concerns around jobs and data centers. There are also questions around children, mental health and a lot more. Which of these issues gets the most traction will I think shape pretty dramatically the way that AI becomes a political issue. Now, it could be all of them, of course, but that is a question to watch.