Enough Debate about the AI Jobpocalypse. We Need To Plan for the Messy Middle.

It often feels like we're stuck in an endless debate about what AI is going to mean for jobs and the economy. Some AI CEOs promise a post-labor Golden Age of abundance and universal high income, while the techno-optimists argue that AI will create more jobs than it destroys, and society’s fears are unjustified. 

When these arguments are traded back and forth, no one can know what's actually true, and nothing happens. And caught in the middle of this debate are actual workers trying to figure out what this means for their family and themselves,  or whether their kids should go to college. And as long as that debate stays alive, nobody plans or takes action ahead of what's coming.

So this week on Your Undivided Attention, rather than continuing to referee this debate, we follow the incentives and show you where they're actually taking us in the very near future. Where, specifically, will AI hit concentrated sectors of our economy? What are the feedback loops and second and third-order consequences of those effects?

Our returning guest, Molly Kinder, recently left her position as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution to become the founding CEO of a new organization dedicated to addressing AI's impact on jobs. Her Substack, Kinder Futures: Dispatches on AI, Work & What Comes Next, features some of the clearest-eyed analysis of AI's impact on the economy.

Corrections

Molly incorrectly referred to cuts to “Medicare for the neediest populations.” The cuts she describes are to Medicaid.