A number of polls, including our own, show Americans are increasingly worried about the economy

and more pessimistic about where it's headed than at any point in recent memory.

March brought the biggest jump in inflation in nearly two years, but it's not just prices.

Americans are anxious about their jobs and specifically about whether AI is coming for them. Some prominent voices are calling it catastrophic. Others say it's all hype.

The data so far is somewhere in between and deeply contested.

Let's try to break down some of this with Josh Terengel.

Of the Atlantic, he's spoken with economists, CEOs, and a number of experts all about this

for his recent piece, America isn't ready for what AI will do to jobs. Josh, thanks for

being with us. My pleasure. So there's been a lot of talk in recent months about AI coming

for, especially entry-level white-collar jobs. You've done all the reporting. Paint a picture for us.

Sure. What I really set out to try and figure out is exactly to your point, like what's actually

happening and what's about to happen. And so I did a little bit of a tour. I spent a ton of time

with economists. And economists are divided really in two ways. We have seen technological disruptions before,

and so economists who love looking backward and comparing data say, you know, there's a large

school than we say, look, if this plays out over a decade or more, there's a natural rate

of adjustment in the labor force, and it may be fine, and it may even

be better than fine, because what we see is that productivity could lift all boats. And so AI may

deliver tremendous productivity. They're a cohort of much younger economists, and I point that out

because the generational divide is really important here, who don't think that

their elders are wrong about the data, they think they're wrong about the tech. So when you look

back at things like electrification, which happened in the early 1900s, it took about 40 years

to fully electrify America and to see the productivity in the data. The difference is that AI rolls itself

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