Alex Imas on Why Economists Might Be Getting AI Wrong
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 18 April 2026
⏱️ 52 minutes
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Summary
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.
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Transcript
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| 1:02.7 | Podcasts, Radio News. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthall. |
| 1:21.0 | And I'm Tracy Allaway. |
| 1:22.3 | Tracy, it may have changed a little bit in recent weeks or months, but I think by and large, by and large, like if you |
| 1:28.7 | talk to economists about the long-term impact of AI, particularly on jobs, by and large, it seems |
| 1:36.1 | like they point to history. And they say there have been many technologies in the past that |
| 1:40.8 | people thought were going to be very disruptive and destroy all kinds of jobs. And in many cases, they did. But technologies create new jobs. We can't necessarily anticipate them beforehand what they're going to be. And AI is like kind of no different ultimately. Yes. But then to your point, you ask like, well, what specific jobs do you have in mind? And I get that, you know, |
| 2:01.9 | it's hard to tell. It's hard to forecast. Only the invisible hand knows. Right. But it's so |
| 2:05.6 | frustrating, right? Because here's this big new technology. It's supposed to be a productivity |
| 2:09.9 | boost. And yet no one is actually sure what new jobs it's going to create from that |
| 2:16.4 | productivity boost. I love him to death, but Edel Mosemek wrote a piece several weeks ago, |
| 2:22.5 | and he was like, well, the player piano disrupted the existence of piano players, |
... |
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