Show Notes
In the second episode of the Platformer podcast, Google SVP James Manyika makes a bet: AI is not going to wipe out half of white-collar jobs in the next two years, no matter what the AI CEOs keep telling you. Platformer's Casey Newton talks to one of tech's most credentialed thinkers on AI and the economy about why labor markets move slower than the technology, what the "missed use" of AI means for countries the boom risks leaving behind, and what really keeps him up at night about AI and work (hint: it's not job loss). Plus: Platformer fellow Ella Markianos brings us a fresh survey of economists on what *they* think will happen with AI and jobs.
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Three months ago, we began our podcast miniseries by asking how likely artificial intelligence is to take large numbers of jobs. Our first guest, Box CEO Aaron Levie, argued that mass disruption would be highly unlikely. And several subsequent guests, from Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman to labor economist Kathryn Ann Edwards, expressed similar skepticism about a labor wipeout.
For our penultimate episode, I wanted to visit someone running a version of that experiment in a somewhat unexpected place: the media business. Dan Shipper runs a website that reviews new technology alongside a product lab that’s building it — and for some time now I’ve wondered what it’s like to work in a place like that.