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

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

Your Undivided Attention vor 3 Wochen

It feels like we're stuck in an endless debate about what AI will mean for jobs and the economy. Caught in the middle of this debate are actual workers trying to figure out what this means for their livelihoods. Rather than continuing to referee this deba

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It feels like we’re stuck in an endless debate about what AI is
going to mean for jobs and the economy. The prediction you hear
from the people closest to the technology — both its critics
and its boosters — is that mass automation is coming, and with it
mass unemployment. In response, some AI CEOs are promising a
post-labor Golden Age of abundance and universal high income. But
you also hear from some techno-optimists and economists that AI
will create more jobs than it destroys and that 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.

Our guest, economist Molly Kinder, argues
that we’re entering what she calls the “messy middle”: a period
of concentrated and uneven workforce disruption. She has
evidence-based arguments about where, specifically, AI will
affect the labor force, what the second and third-order
consequences of those effects might be, and what we need to do
today to protect people’s livelihoods.

Molly 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.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

Kinder Futures: Dispatches on AI, Work & What Comes Next
(Molly’s Substack)

Molly’s blog posts at Brookings

The Yale Budget Lab’s AI Labor Market Tracker

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

AI and the Future of Work: What You Need to Know

Is AI Productivity Worth Our Humanity? with Prof. Michael Sandel

AI and Jobs: How to Make AI Work With Us, Not Against Us with
Daron Acemoglu

Corrections

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

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