How AI could help rebuild the middle class

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 17 May 2023

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For the last four decades, technology has been mostly a force for greater inequality and a shrinking middle class. But new empirical evidence suggests that the age of AI could be different. We speak to MIT's David Autor, one of the greatest labor economists in the world, who envisions a future where we use AI to make a wider array of workers much better at a whole range of jobs and help rebuild the middle class.

This episode was produced by Dave Blanchard and edited by Molly Messick. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Katherine Silva. Jess Jiang is Planet Money's acting executive producer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:06.8	It's been about six months since Chatschy BT was released to the public.
0:10.9	And basically, from the moment that happened, it felt like this seismic shift.
0:16.3	Because all of a sudden, people everywhere realized just how powerful artificial intelligence
0:22.3	already is.
0:23.3	They began using this AI chatbot to do all sorts of things.
0:27.0	Right?
0:28.0	Raps to take the bar exam, to identify bugs in computer code and fix them.
0:32.1	I mean, all that stuff is pretty cool.
0:34.6	But at the same time, there's been all this doom and gloom about AI.
0:39.0	Will it take our jobs?
0:40.6	Will it derail democracy?
0:42.5	Will it kill us all?
0:44.0	And these aren't like off the wall questions.
0:46.0	Like, serious people are asking these questions right now.
0:48.6	Yeah, it's kind of easy to fall into this like doom spiral these days.
0:53.4	But then a couple of weeks ago, I saw something that gave me like this little glimmer of hope.
0:58.6	It was a study that looked at this customer service department of a big software company.
1:03.7	And they started using Chatschy BT to help workers get better at their jobs.
1:07.4	And interestingly enough, it worked.
1:09.8	Like it made the less skilled workers at this company much more productive.
1:14.8	And at the same time, it didn't do much for workers at the top.
	...

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