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Will AI Take Our Jobs?: “This Time It's Not Different"


Transcript

I'd like to summarize my thoughts in three charts. And I call this, "This Time It's Not Different." Chart number one is a look at the components of U.S. GDP. This is from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The components of GDP are surprisingly resilient and roughly the same over long stretches of time.

So if that is true, what happens when you have any kind of a revolution? So let's look at the Industrial Revolution, the shift from farms to factories. And what you saw was in specific job classes, things just fall to zero. So this is what people are worried about. But if you remember the last chart, somehow we found a way to find growth.

And this is what's demonstrated on this final chart, which is when you look at U.S. productivity and worker compensation, you find that every time we find a new way of innovating, compensation tends to track it. As productivity goes up, which is what AI should give us, compensation also goes up, which means new job classes will be created.

It feels more personal right now because we're all living it, But I suspect that this time is not different.