What A.I. Is Actually Doing to the Economy
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm David Marchese. And I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro.
And we're the hosts of The Interview from The New York Times.
David and I have spent our careers interviewing some of the most interesting and influential people in the world.
Which means we know when to ask tough questions and when to just sit back and listen.
And now we've teamed up to have these conversations every week.
We'll try to reveal something about the people shaping our world.
And we'll get some great stories from them, too.
It's The Interview from The New York Times. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. I want you to fill in the blank for me, okay? So I feel blank about AI. I feel mixed feelings about AI. I feel anxious about AI. It's a love-hate relationship for sure.
Completely conflicted. AI is amazing and it's making me a better writer, but it's also taking my job away. From the New York Times, I'm Zolan Kano-Youngs filling in as host. This is The Daily. As AI becomes more advanced, people are getting increasingly nervous about how it could change the economy and their jobs.
I'm seeing a lot of job loss because of it. It's a threat to my profession. I really have to rethink what I do for a living and probably do something else. Oh my God, this thing is going to take my job and not only is going to, but actually did.
But for all the anxiety, what AI is actually doing to the economy remains pretty murky.
Seems like it's taking over being me.
Today, Chief Economics Correspondent Ben Castleman on why AI's impact has been so hard to pin down and what we can learn from the tech disruptions of the past. It's Monday, July 27th.
How we doing? Doing well. Appreciate you doing this. Yeah, excited to sit down for this.
How worried are Americans about AI's effect on jobs and the economy?
Excited to be hosted by you. I'm trying to accumulate as many daily hosts as I can. Like Pokemon. That's right, exactly. All right, I'm just gonna jump in. Let's do it. Ben, I'm picking up on a lot of anxiety when it comes to how artificial intelligence will impact our economy. We know from polling that about 70% of Americans think AI will lead to fewer jobs. So as someone who talks to economists every day, how much of your time is being taken up by this question of how AI will impact the economy? I think it is arguably the important question. We talk all the time about tariffs and oil prices and all of these shocks that are hitting the economy. And those are all, of course, incredibly important issues.
But I think it's very possible that if you and I are sitting here in five years or ten years looking back on this period, that the thing we'll be talking about is AI and kind of the early signs of how it was affecting the economy. I don't think we know what that conversation will look like. I don't think we know what big change we will have seen. But it certainly feels like this is the moment where it's all starting. Right. This is interesting because, you know, sometimes I feel like we hear AI is going to be a godsend to workers. It's going to make us all 100 percent more productive or it'll wipe out all white collar jobs entirely. What do you make of those predictions? So I think there are a couple of answers to that question.
One is that it's early. We're still figuring out how to use this technology. It's still being rolled out. But beyond that, we don't even really know with confidence what's happening now. Predicting the future is hard, but even knowing the immediate moment is difficult because our economic data really wasn't designed and isn't up to capturing a change that's happening this rapidly in anything close to real time. Can you explain that a little bit more to me? Why don't we know? Well, I mean, so let me take a simple example of this, right? We get the monthly jobs report and we talk about how many jobs were added or lost in the economy in a given month. If you go and look in that report the next time it comes out and you want to look at what happened with tech jobs, you will not find that anywhere in the report.
Because we don't break out tech as its own industry. These industry categories were established literally decades ago.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:10
2
How worried are Americans about AI's effect on jobs and the economy?
2:10–19:36
3
Why is it so hard to measure AI's current impact with government data?
19:36–28:46
4
How are private-sector data sources giving conflicting pictures of AI and employment?
28:46–36:12
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Daily
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