Benjamin Todd
speaker
4,140 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2023
last heard 28 May
Benjamin Todd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
But yeah, with those caveats, I do think people are often, especially technologists, a bit too quick to assume there will be lots of unemployment due to AI.
The key way of seeing it is partial automation of a job often increases wages and employment for that job.
Like an empirical example is people have been saying radiologists are going to be made unemployed for ages because AI can do image recognition really well, but actually radiologist employment is up.
And I think average wages in the U.S.
are something like $500,000 a year.
So it's even still a super highly paid job.
And there's, I think, actually a pretty straightforward explanation of this, which is only about a third of their time is spent analyzing images.
And that means...
like all the other stuff they're doing is stuff that AI can't really do yet.
It's like coordinating with other employees at the hospital and like talking to the patients about how to understand the results and like, oh, the machine is broken and we need to like figure out whether to trust these scans and stuff like that.
And so even if the kind of like routine bit that AI can do becomes like much more efficient, it's only actually increasing their productivity by like 20 or 30%.
And then yeah, if you increase the productivity of a job by 20%, that might even mean you hire more of them.
It depends on the job, but say like with a sales team, if each of your salespeople can just sell 50% more because they can like use AI to like find lots of leads and like help draft emails and now they're just like going a lot faster.
Like, why wouldn't you just get 50% more revenue by, or even more?
You might even be like, previously I had to pay this marketer 50K, but they would only bring in 30K of revenue.
So it's no point doing it.
But if then now they bring in 60K of revenue, then you might even hire more people.
Well, so companies would be, in general, they'd be trying to maximize total profits.
And so if you can like, if you can just get a lot more done, then you will make more revenue, which will mean you will make more profits.
So that would generally be what people would try to do first.
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