Alex Imas on Why Economists Might Be Getting AI Wrong
Quotes & Clips
5 clipsAI might disrupt labor differently than past technologies
“I kind of feel maybe this is not just going to be like the steam engine or whatever. It might be very different. Maybe we won't have jobs, maybe there will be new jobs. Anyway, someone who's been talking and thinking a lot about this and why AI might be different, we're going to be speaking with the perfect guest.”
Generality distinguishes current AI from prior narrow tools
“In the jump from like where we were thinking about AI as these very very very targeted things like AI will play the game Go or something like that to something where WHOA, it can write an essay, it can tell me about this accounting property, it can make a four cast. All of a sudden, the generality of the technologies just exploded, and to me that was a huge deal.”
Rapid development speed creates a massive productivity gap
“When you like look at like some of like what was cutting edge in twenty nineteen, and then you look at what's cutting edge in late twenty twenty two, I'm almost more impressed than if like I hadn't known what they were up to in twenty nineteen. Like it's a huge gap with those few years.”
Social skills are becoming the future of labor
“I actually think that's kind of where we might be heading, where like the sort of social skills I've said before, the looksmaxing, the personal branding, the multitasking, I guess like becomes more important. So the future is performative humanity.”
AI is mastering complex and sophisticated cognitive tasks
“Even after a few months and like within the year, you saw that it was able to kind of do basic cognitive tasks to a decent degree. Like it wasn't like we are going to replace that person, but it was doing pretty sophisticated things that in the jump from thinking about AI as targeted things to something general exploded.”
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Episode Description
Everyone knows that new technologies can be really disruptive to the labor market, but eventually new jobs emerge and things come back into balance. And there is a sense in which many view AI with the same lens. Yes, there will be pain in some sectors, but then there will be productivity gains and new sources of demand and new opportunities for labor that we can't conceive of yet. But could it be different this time? Could AI be disruptive in a manner that, say, the steam engine was not? On this episode we speak with Alex Imas, a professor at the University of Chicago focusing on economics and applied AI. We talk about his work on the AI and labor question, how to think about which jobs may be most at risk, and why the sheer speed of AI development could make it categorically different than prior general purpose technologies that came before it. Subscribe to the Odd Lots Newsletter Join the conversation: discord.gg/oddlots See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.