Kathryn Anne Edwards

Do you need to know exactly what AI is doing on the job and to workers to respond to weakness in the labor market?

I mean, it's not as if the only thing standing between young workers and a job is what private employers are doing or say they are doing or will do with AI.

We have a weak economy and a weak labor market with terrible social supports and almost no investment in people that don't have a job.

I don't need to know what a company is doing to AI to know that our government does a terrible job in certain aspects of the labor market.

So I think your frustration is well-deserved but not necessarily well-placed because there are solutions that don't have to come from just knowing more about AI but have to come from holding our policymakers accountable for economic mismanagement.

AI is today's story, but there will be another one.

Weakness is weakness in the labor market.

We don't have great infrastructure for helping people who don't have a job.

AI won't change that.

It'll just make it look worse.

So it's almost a, I could see it being so dissatisfying to have to deal with your story, Ed, but there is satisfaction if you go after the things you can change as opposed to the things you can't change or even see.

I think that it's the thing that people care about today, the thing that people are afraid of today.

So, you know, the economy—we don't work for the economy.

The economy works for us.

If this is a thing that we think is coming that people are afraid of, we can respond to it.

And I can sit in, like, my big room full of books and be like, well, actually, Ed, people said the same thing in the 1920s.

They did.

America does not like unemployed people.

But that's not—that doesn't mean that, like—

we have to do something to correct for the past and me point out that we've never had a great system for unemployment support.