Will AI help or hurt workers? One 26-year-old found an unexpected answer.
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Daron Acemoglu, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who recently won the Nobel Prize in economics, worries that artificial intelligence will worsen income inequality and not do all that much for productivity. His friend and colleague David Autor is more hopeful, believing that AI could do just the opposite.
New research from Aidan Toner-Rodgers, an MIT doctoral student, challenges both Acemoglu’s pessimism and Autor’s optimism. Both professors are raving about it. “It’s fantastic," said Acemoglu.
“I was floored," said Autor. Neither Autor nor Acemoglu is changing his mind on AI. But the research by Toner-Rodgers, 26 years old, is a step toward figuring out what AI might do to the workforce, by examining AI’s effect in the real world.
Many economists, including Autor and Acemoglu, have looked at how earlier technologies have reshaped the labor market. But while this understanding of the past provides important context, how AI will affect the economy is difficult to tease out: Will it be like the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine, which transformed entire industries, boosting growth, creating vast categories of new work and lifting millions of Americans into new, more productive, better-paying jobs? Or the zeppelins of the 1920s and 1930s, which people thought would be world changers and are now a nostalgic afterthought? To figure out where AI might fit, economists need careful studies of its use in today’s workplace. Toner-Rodgers’s paper does just that.
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