Kathryn Anne Edwards

you know, companies blaming something else for layoffs, I mean, that's a tale as old as time, right?

We, you know, it's not that we want to cut jobs, it's just that the minimum wage is too high, and therefore we need to put all of your retail staff on an iPad.

It's not that we, you know, don't want to raise your pay, it's that healthcare, you know, Obamacare made it required and now it's too expensive.

I mean, if you go back, every decade has a new person to blame, a new story that shifts the blame from employer, or rather corporate responsibility,

onto some other factor in the economy where they say, you know, our hands are tied and this is a blameless way for me to make a decision I'd like to make anyway.

Lots of candidates for that over time.

You know, we'll never really know the degree to which it's happening.

We can only look to see what the data tells us with clear eyes.

Those eyes are hard to keep clear.

So I think what it comes down to is we don't know the degree or effectiveness to which AI has been adopted by firms, so we can't trace out its labor market consequences.

So it leaves room for basically both of your scenarios, both that AI is starting to –

You know, crowd out certain positions that could be entry level.

So it hasn't led to layoffs, but it's reducing hiring.

And at the same time, it could also be a very, very convenient fall guy for otherwise corporate mismanagement during what are unprecedented economic times coming out of a pandemic and going straight into inflation.

Yes, and it's leaning, I think both stories lean on what we think to be absolutely the case, which is that AI will replace jobs in the future.

It will cause job loss to the extent that it'll also cause job creation, and we don't know what the pace of those two things will be, and we don't know how it plays out over time.

We know looking back to every other technological development that has hit the U.S.

labor market, it takes a long time for it to be absorbed into productivity.

I mean, I could show you

per worker productivity in the United States going back to the 40s.