Why Doomers Are Wrong about AI and Jobs with Google's James Manyika

**Casey Newton** (0:00)
So many top AI CEOs keep telling us that AI is about to take all of our jobs. I talked to a senior executive at Google who's willing to make a big bet that they've got it all wrong. This podcast is brought to you by Atlassian Rovo, the AI that takes your team from AI novice to AI native.
Welcome to Platformer, I'm Casey Newton, and our guest today on the show is James Manyika. He's the Senior Vice President at Google and Alphabet, where he runs Google's research and labs operations, along with what Google calls technology and society, which is basically Google's effort to think hard about the broader consequences of the AI it is currently building. But before we get to James, we want to begin, as we always do here on the Platformer pod, with numbers. We are obsessed around here with the subject of AI and jobs. And each week, we're kicking off the show with fresh data, trying to make sense of what is actually happening on the ground. So joining me once again to do that is Platformer fellow and Gen Z AI correspondent, Ella Markianos. Let's bring her in.
Ella, welcome back to Platformer.

**Ella Markianos** (1:25)
Hi, it's wonderful to be here. How's it going, Casey?

**Casey Newton** (1:31)
It's going great. Whenever we talk, I'm always curious, have there been any developments over the past week when it comes to the automating of your own job? Sort of any dangerous signs on the horizon that you're scanning for?

**Ella Markianos** (1:44)
I love to tell you this, Casey, nothing has progressed towards taking my job this particular week. In fact, Claude continues to say things to me sometimes, which makes me pretty happy.

**Casey Newton** (2:01)
Yeah, shame on Claude. This is true. We caught Claude siting a grokopedia this week as a team, which was hugely disappointing to all of us.

**Ella Markianos** (2:10)
Yeah, I do find, I think this is actually more true for Gemini than Claude, but the thing they currently have weird blind spots on is Googling. If a page looks nicely formatted and it resembles a source they think is useful, then they just will cite it to you.
And so especially for a while, I couldn't use Gemini because it was always sending me these Times of India articles that were re-digested slightly versions of mainstream news articles. Yeah, anyway, so kind of the opposite. However, I do have some gloomy statistics for you this week.

**Casey Newton** (2:54)
Perfect. Because when we went out, we did a survey of the Platformer podcast readership, and we said, what is the thing that will make our show go viral on social media? And they said, gloomy statistics. So you're perfectly hitting the task at hand. What have you brought to us this week from the world of AI and labor?

**Ella Markianos** (3:12)
Cool. So this will require a little bit of explanation. Basically, I'm going to talk to you about this cool survey from the Forecasting Research Institute, where they get like 70 economists, many of whom specialize in AI and labor economics, a few of whom have Nobel prizes, and they aggregate their forecasts about what is going to happen with AI, GDP growth, jobs, etc.

**Casey Newton** (3:41)
So, this is like a wisdom of the crowd. It's like Cal-She, if it weren't just insider trading, is sort of how this is sounding to me so far.

**Ella Markianos** (3:48)
Yeah, verified Cal-She, yeah. Yeah, excellent.
Yeah, I can't guarantee they didn't do any insider trading, you know, I have it.

**Casey Newton** (3:57)
Fair enough.
There may be some insider trading involved in this, but if it happened, we don't know about it. So, that's our caveat. So, okay, so they go out to these economists, and what do they ask them? Yeah.

**Ella Markianos** (4:10)
So, the thing I really like about this survey is like, often when you're talking about economist consensus on AI and jobs, you kind of lump in two things, which is, what do economists think is going to happen with AI? How fast do they think AI will progress? And then like conditioning on a certain level of AI progress. What do, which is like really where you want to hear the economists cook, is like given a certain series of facts about what AI can do, like how will that actually affect jobs, GDP growth, stuff like that.
And so basically what this survey did is split up AI futures through 2032 into three buckets. Kind of like the slow bucket, the medium bucket, the fast bucket. And the slow bucket, it's like AI continues to basically be a personal assistant that you can't autonomously give tasks to very well. Instead of giving you research reports of like literature reviews of a bad PhD student in 2032, it gives you research reviews of a good PhD student.