The Economist Who Believes AI Will Be Great for the Middle Class

David Autor (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios.

Tracy Alloway (0:04)

Podcasts, radio, news.

Joe Weisenthal (0:17)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:23)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:24)

Tracy, I feel like AI is a great thing for anyone who wants to have an opinion on anything. It's like this blank canvas out there in which any idea you have, it's just a great moment for pontificators in general.

Tracy Alloway (0:38)

Well, not only can you hang a bunch of different opinions on it, but it can generate those opinions for you.

Joe Weisenthal (0:45)

Yeah, you can, that's right, you can just go to ChatGPT and say which jobs are gonna be lost thanks to you and it'll spew some answer forward based on the collective wisdom of trillions of words that people have typed over the years.

Tracy Alloway (0:59)

I do think though, if we're talking about one opinion in particular, the dominant opinion at this point in time, it does feel like there's a lot of nervousness about this new technology and what exactly it means for the economy, what specifically it means for jobs. And so you see all these headlines that AI is going to lead to a bunch of job losses, that it's gonna basically be a new technological revolution that plays out very similarly to the computer revolution that led to the destruction of a bunch of sort of middle office jobs or the industrial revolution that led to a loss of skilled artisan jobs.

And we've seen some hints of that to be fair. So, I'm thinking back to last year, I think it was in the summer, maybe in June, and the Challenger jobs report came out. And for the first time ever, they included a line about job losses stemming from AI.

Joe Weisenthal (1:57)

Yeah, although I'm just gonna say right here that I think when a company lays off workers and says it's due to AI, I still have this assumption that it's like, we're doing badly, so we're gonna put a positive spin on it by making it seem as though our layoffs are the result of some internal productivity breakthrough that we're getting from a chat bot. So like, I don't quite believe it, but I take note.

Tracy Alloway (2:19)

I think that's totally fair. That's totally fair. But I think clearly this is something people are paying attention to. You are starting to see some of the economic reports sort of break this down, at least the Challenger report, if not like the BLS and things like that.

So there is this idea hovering over the economy at the moment, which is, okay, maybe AI will be great for productivity, we'll get that boost, but what does it mean for jobs?

Joe Weisenthal (2:44)

Right, basically everyone in any realm loses their job and is on the UBI drip, and only Sam Altman is the last person who is employed.

But I don't know, I get freaked out. It's pretty good. There are many, I use AI almost chatbots all the time in my work, and it's like, well, maybe it could one day be a better host than myself for a podcast. It seems possible to me.

I am anxious. Of course, people also like to project onto their perceived ideological enemies. That's like, oh, all you English majors are gonna lose your jobs, ha, ha, ha. And then the English majors all go, all you coders are gonna lose your jobs and you're gonna need English majors. It's just an endless thing. And actually, I think I tune most of it out because it's so ambiguous, in my view, where this technology is going, that there are very few people I even want to hear from on the topic because I think it's just so, there's so much extreme uncertainty still.

Tracy Alloway (3:37)

Extreme uncertainty, as you mentioned, people kind of harness it to further their own biases or arguments, but you're right. There are people who are good on this topic and we're about to speak to one of them.

Joe Weisenthal (3:49)

That's exactly right. So last month, there was this really interesting headline that I saw in a Naweema magazine.

And it sort of felt like this sort of like provocative, maybe clickbaity type headline that said, AI could actually help rebuild the middle class. It's very counterintuitive, very the opposite of what we're talking about. But then I noticed who the author of the piece was, and it's someone whose work is very strongly associated with forces in the past and forces in technology that have been destructive to the middle class and have caused great labor market upheaval. And so if someone who has sort of been watching this exact topic, the intersection of labor market upheaval and technological change is saying, actually, this could be good. And this person is a track record in this area. I'm like, okay, this is an argument maybe I'll pay more attention to than the random person doing a Twitter thread.