00:00 Speaker A
Meta is planning to fully automate advertising with AI by the end of next year, according to the Wall Street Journal. The news is part of a broader shift to the implementation of AI in the technical workforce, a shift that, according to Anthropic CEO, can wipe out 50% of the jobs at entry level in the coming five years. Here to discuss, Darrell West, Brookings Institution Senior Fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation and author of “The Future of Work: Robots, AI and Automation.” Great to talk to you here this morning, Darrell. Talk to me about how you would define the impact of AI on staff in the future.
00:49 Darrell West
Well, Madison, I think you're right in the intro in the sense that there will be significant job losses of AI. Uh, we are already seeing it in entry positions. Certainly, administrative tasks are easy to automate. Some technology companies recently had fired. 40% of the dismissed people have been coders. So even in the software area, an area that we thought was safe for automation will no longer be safe.
01:30 am Speaker A
And then talk to me about a kind of net effect of AI on the staff here. Is there a potential, as there is with every technological disruption, of new jobs that are created with which those coders can work?
2:01 AM Darrell West
New jobs will certainly be made based on some of the emerging technologies. But the problem is what we call the mismatch problem, what the skills needed for some of the new jobs are skills that many of the dismissed people will not necessarily have. So it will really emphasize the retraining of the work. People will have to upgrade their work skills. And so we will really have to pay much more attention to switching the people for those new jobs that will be created.
3:05 AM Speaker A
What do you think of the net inflation -impact of all this? Is it the inflationary in the short term because we have to do a lot of resources to invest in AI, or is it disinflationary because we have a lot of job losses because of this?
3:25 AM Darrell West
Well, I think that employees will end in a worse position in the sense that, certainly, the people who are fired, uh, given the skills they have, it will be difficult for them to find, uh, jobs because they can look in other companies or in other organizations. Those companies are going to do exactly the same. So it really shows that people have to upgrade their skills. Uh, it will influence the economy and the figures can be quite substantial.
