Is AI Doom Going Out of Style?

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, could we be actually at the beginning of an AI vibe shift? The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. Today is a main only episode. A, it's kind of a big topic. B, it's kind of a grab bag topic that brings a lot of pieces together. And C, as part of that grab bag, it turns out that a lot of the headlines also fit within this theme. I anticipate we will be back with our normal format tomorrow, but for now, let's find out why Ezra Klein doesn't think the AI job apocalypse will happen as it has been foretold.
Welcome back to The AI Daily Brief. Today, we're talking about what is potentially the beginning of an AI vibe shift. The signals, while faint, are there that the conversation and discourse around AI is, if not changing, at least having a new strand that doesn't assume that we are just hurtling ourselves off of a cliff.
What's interesting and what makes it a trend that's actually worth watching is that it's happening both in the chattering class around jobs as well as in markets. The fact that it's coming from two sides at once means there's a much higher potential that it actually is a narrative shift rather than just a very temporary blip before doom takes over once again.
Now, to get us to this point, there are two pieces from the last couple of weeks, which I think stand as poles in the conversation. On the one hand is that essay from Jasmine Sun published in The New York Times called Silicon Valley is bracing for a permanent underclass. It's a well-sourced piece from Jasmine talking to her friends, contacts, and peers in the AI space in San Francisco and Silicon Valley about how they think AI is going to take everyone's job.
Now, I discussed this one in the weekly episode from Friday, The Week AI Grew Up.
Now, while I think the piece was well-sourced and well-researched, the issue that I have is with over-aggrandizing the perspective of the people building AI on what the impact of AI in society is going to be. This is certainly intellectually tempting in the sense that you would think that the people who are closest to the new technology would have some insight into it, but I think it's actually just structurally wrong.
First of all, there are some reasons to think that the people who are closest to AI might be wildly overestimating its impact. Cynically, they have good reason to, with IPOs looming on the horizon, but even removing that cynicism from things, a lot of what AI so far is really, really good at is the day in and day out of their work, i.e. AI is now doing all the coding, which means it must do everything else in the future too. There are a whole bunch of reasons to be slightly skeptical of that, but the second reason overall, for a little bit more perhaps discernment around how much we lionize the perspective of the AI builders when it comes to the impact of their technology in the world is that Silicon Valley doesn't really have a good track record of understanding what's going on outside of Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley is full of builders, builders without which we wouldn't have a lot of our most important innovations. What it is not full of is economists and researchers, at least of the non-AI variety, and people who have worked in any sort of setting outside of startups.
And for that perspective, there was also an essay last month that appears to have been even more influential. That essay is of course the one by University of Chicago economist Alex Imas, that we covered last week on LRS in our episode about where the post-AI economy thrives. That essay got a lot of traction in the AI circles, but with an opinion piece by Ezra Klein, once again in the New York Times this week, it now has a much bigger audience as well. The piece by Ezra was called Why the AI Job Apocalypse Probably Won't Happen, and is significant if for no other reason that it's not coming from the usual suspect AI accelerationist voices. In other words, if Mark Andreessen wrote this, it wouldn't be nearly as important. Now, Ezra points out that a lot of the reason for the negative narrative is the AI labs themselves. He writes, If you believe the story the AI labs are telling, it's hard to see what stands between us and mass unemployment. AI has been designed to cheaply mimic what human beings can do on a computer, but never needs to sleep, never tries to form a union, and often outperforms real people on real tasks. Of course, companies will want to replace human beings with this human-being-replacement machine.