David Autor

Thank you very much.

Pleasure to be here.

What's actually changing is a lot of that work requires deep reservoirs of expertise and training and judgment.

And with better tools, more people could do some of that work effectively without as much training, without as many years in school.

Doesn't mean we don't need the people who are even more expert, but there's a lot of medical care that requires skills and expertise, but it isn't at the frontier.

And more people could do that work with the right tools.

Over the last four years, we've seen a real hollowing out of the distribution of occupations where people in the middle, people with high school and some college education, working in offices, working in factories, specialized, knowledge-intensive work that has been displaced a lot of it by automation, some of it by trade.

And those people have been pushed forward.

predominantly downward into low paid services food service cleaning security etc socially valuable work but poorly paid because it's an expert because most people can do that work without training or certification the hope is we could move more people back into the middle not into the same occupations that previously existed but into a new set of more knowledge intensive

more decision-intensive, more judgment-intensive set of activities.

It's where a lot of the value is.

And what could get them there?

Well, it's a combination of the right training, foundational education for those activities, for medicine, for law, for software, for engineering, for construction, and better tools.

Then now people to do that work, that high-stakes work, more effectively because they have the supporting infrastructure, the guidance and guardrails to use their knowledge effectively.

AI would be central to creating those tools.

We haven't had technologies for creating similar tools until now.

No, not very well.

And this is an important point, something that others have emphasized that I worked on as well, is a lot of the work that we do is new work.

It's not simply the same work done faster.

A lot of employment is in work that didn't exist.