00:00 Speaker a
According to the Wall Street Journal, Meta plans to fully automate advertising with AI by the end of next year. The news is part of a broader shift to the technology workforce implementing AI, Anthropic CEO said that in the next five years, the shift could eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar work. Discussed here, Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution at the Brookings Center for Technology Innovation and the author of “The Future of Work: Robots, Artificial Intelligence and Automation.” Glad to talk to you this morning, Darrell. Talk to me about how you will define the impact of AI on future employees.
00:49 Darrell West
Well, Madison, I think you are right in the sense of introduction, and there will be a lot of unemployment. Well, we’ve seen it in entry-level positions. Of course, management tasks are easy to automate. Some tech companies have recently laid off employees. 40% of people who are fired are coders. So even in software areas, the areas we used to think are no longer safe.
01:30 Speaker a
Then talk to me about the network effect of AI here on the labor force. Is there potential, like every technological disruption, to create new work that these coders can start using?
02:01 Darrell West
There will definitely be new work created based on some emerging technologies. But the problem is what we call a mismatch problem, that is, the skills required for some new jobs are skills that many people who are fired don’t necessarily have. So this does focus on work retraining. People will have to improve their work skills. So we will really have to focus more on the new jobs that will be created to retrain.
03:05 Speaker a
How do you view the net inflation impact of all this? Is this recent inflation because we have to invest a lot of resources in AI, or is it a huge loss due to our unemployment situation, which is dissolved?
03:25 Darrell West
Well, I think workers will end up in a worse position, and in a sense, given the skills they have, it is certainly difficult for people who are fired to find jobs because they may be looking for jobs in other companies or other organizations. These companies will do the same. So, it does show that people will have to improve their skills. Well, this will affect the economy, and the numbers can be huge.
