


7 Sep 2026 · 30m · 18 chapters

Labor Day special on whether AI will spark a new industrial revolution—its effects on jobs, productivity, inequality, and what workers and policymakers should do.
Eric Brynjolfsson, Stanford professor and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI; director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab.
AI is like the steam engine—augmenting “minds” and transforming the economy faster than past shifts. No mass unemployment expected; instead “mass disruption.” Productivity gains are emerging but not yet broadly spread (overall productivity still ~2%). Much AI investment is wasted because firms don’t pair tech with retraining and process change. Biggest risk is widening wealth/political power concentration.
“Canaries in the Coal Mine” using payroll data—call centers show 30–35% higher productivity when AI complements work; highly AI-exposed occupations show ~19% lower employment for ages 22–25 (correlated, not proven causal). AI can help writing/summarizing but not tasks like lifting boxes or plumbing. Suggested policies: retraining, portable benefits, entrepreneurship support; possible “AI/robot tax” to slow disruption and rebalance incentives toward labor.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes.
Discussing the gap between advancing technology and economic transformation.
“There's this huge gap between the technology racing ahead, the capabilities are much better.”
Exploring the similarities between AI's impact and the historical Industrial Revolution.
“So the tradition of Labor Day started after the Industrial Revolution, when a huge technological shift changed the way that we work for the good and the bad.”
Eric Brynjolfsson discusses the pace of economic transformation due to AI.
“So for that, I want to bring in Eric Brynjolfsson.”
Identifying early signs of AI's impact on productivity in various sectors.
“But the transformation that we'll start seeing, I think we're already seeing the inklings of it right now, is going to accelerate over the next 5, 10, 15 years.”
Discussing the importance of strategic investments in AI to maximize benefits.
“And I think we're in that point where the economy is just turning the corner.”
Eric Brynjolfsson shares his perspective on AI's potential benefits and challenges.
“because Bill Gates came out with this, you know, like AI manifesto.”
Discussing the implications of AI on job markets and preparation strategies.
“Again, it depends a lot on how we use the technology.”
Exploring how AI influences entry-level job opportunities for young workers.
“So I want to talk about this study that you have mentioned, which is canaries in the coal mine, where your team looked at how AI is impacting the economy right now.”
Highlighting essential skills for young workers in an AI-driven economy.
“I want to stop you for a second because I want to understand what you're saying here.”
Explore how AI is changing task execution and the need for new skills in workers.
“that replace workers, and there's ways to use AI that complement workers.”
Discuss the gender gaps in tech and how AI affects women's employment.
“paying jobs are going to be taken over by tech.”
Understand the transition towards skilled labor and its implications for workers.
“There's parts of cognitive work that are going to be replaced.”
Examine the potential widening wealth gap as AI reshapes the economy.
“Obviously, sports is a big category for that and entertainment.”
Examine the potential widening wealth gap as AI reshapes the economy.
“See Jared.com backslash radio for details.”
Learn how historical labor movements can inform our current response to AI changes.
“There's this huge gap between the technology racing ahead, the capabilities are much better.”
Discover how AI is reshaping the workplace and the potential for reduced work hours.
“It's something we need to work for, I think Labor Day is a good time for us to remember that there's this huge opportunity to make us all better off, but only if we work towards that future.”
Learn about the balance of job creation and destruction due to AI advancements.
“And by say, as we get wealthier, who are you talking about?”
Explore the evolving role of AI in management and decision-making processes.
“plenty of jobs and that's going to be quite a long way off.”

Get the gist, explore an idea or ask about something said.
On Here's the Scoop, what are the key points of this episode?
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.
0:00There's this huge gap between the technology racing ahead, the capabilities are much better. And part of that's because a lot of smart people and literally hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested in that. On the other side, we're investing very little in understanding how to transform the economy, what this means for labor, for productivity, for work. Hi, everybody, and welcome to Here's the Scoop from NBC News. I'm Yasmin Basugin. Happy Labor Day. It is the unofficial end of summer, which is sad, but we do celebrate by taking the day off before we have to work a lot. So the tradition of Labor Day started after the Industrial Revolution, when a huge technological shift changed the way that we work for the good and the bad.
0:46And that is happening again today with artificial intelligence. And just like back then, there are people who say AI is the best thing ever for the economy for prosperity and others who are ringing alarm bells. So today on the show, we're going to take a look at how AI is affecting the job market and how we can prepare ourselves for the AI revolution. So for that, I want to bring in Eric Brynjolfsson. He's professor and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI and director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. Hi, Eric. Good to be here, guys. Great to have you. So I want to start off with this comparison to the industrial revolution because we do hear this a lot in which AI is kind of like the steam engine, right?
1:36Is that a fair comparison? I think so. There are some similarities. You know, the steam engine ignited the Industrial Revolution, and one of the things it did was it augmented our muscles. Now we have a technology that's augmenting our minds. I think that's going to be as big or bigger as the Industrial Revolution and probably transform the economy a lot faster. Okay, so you said transform the economy a lot faster because there are those that say, whether or not you're a pessimist or an optimist when it comes to this AI revolution, that it's going to happen pretty quickly, right? And they're looking at possibly the next five years.
2:11Do you think that is likely or is that the optimistic perspective? Well, there'll be certainly changes that happen within the next five years. I think productivity is going to grow a lot faster than, say, the Congressional Budget Office is predicting. We're going to see businesses changing a lot. I don't think we're going to see mass unemployment or anything like that, that some of the more apocalyptic predictions. This will continue to play out over decades. But the transformation that we'll start seeing, I think we're already seeing the inklings of it right now, is going to accelerate over the next 5, 10, 15 years.
2:44Are we already seeing these massive productivity gains from AI? Like, is the revolution already here, or are we heading towards it? I'd say we're heading towards it. You know, we have a paper called Canaries in the Coal Mine that basically says you look for these early signs of change. Some of the early signs we see in productivity. We see call centers. I did a paper with Danielle Lee and Lindsay Raymond where we found that call centers had up to 30, 35 percent more productivity. We're seeing people who've done studies of coding and writing software where you get also double digits, in some cases triple digit productivity gains.
3:23But if you look at the broader economy, that hasn't spread that much. And so overall productivity is still fairly muted, a little close to 2 percent. Maybe if you squint, it's a little higher than it used to be, but we're not seeing a broad takeoff yet. That's totally expected. We've done research. We call it the productivity J curve, where initially it takes a while for productivity to build up steam, and then it starts taking off after a few years. And I think we're in that point where the economy is just turning the corner. Here's the thing, though. Companies are investing huge in AI right now.
3:56And the messaging is essentially, if you haven't invested in AI, if you're not using AI at your company already, you're behind the curve. How can they ensure that these investments that they're making now are actually going to pay off? That's a great question. It's the multi-trillion dollar question. I think, frankly, a lot of the money is being wasted. It's not being spent correctly. And the reason for that is they're not measuring it as carefully as they should be. They're not making the complementary investments in retraining workers, changing their business processes. So it's not enough to just go out and buy the shiniest new technology.
4:28You have to do a more fundamental transformation, and that requires much better data. Most companies are kind of experimenting. They're doing pilots, and they aren't yet harvesting the full benefits. So I want to kind of get down to like the brass tacks of this and understand where you stand on AI and whether or not you're an optimist or pessimist about whether or not AI is going to take everything from us or actually make us better. because Bill Gates came out with this, you know, like AI manifesto. Yes. And he wrote in part this, in terms of equity, AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented or the worst source of injustice.
5:07Right now, there's a lot of people who are worried AI is going to eliminate jobs, right? AI is coming and it's going to take everybody's jobs. And unlike the Industrial Revolution, which created a lot of jobs, do you feel as if AI is going to do good for us? Or is it going to create a real problem for Americans and their jobs? Well, that's a great question, but let me push back on the way it's phrased and not to be nitpicky, but you're saying, is AI going to do this? Is AI going to do that? AI is a tool that we use. And I don't like the sense that we're giving up our agency and sort of sitting back to see what AI does to us.
5:51I would like to see us think about using this technology to change the world. I agree with Bill Gates that the next 10 years could be the best 10 years in human history. They could also be the worst. And it depends not on what AI does to us. It depends on what we do with AI. It's a more powerful tool than we've ever had before, which by definition means we have more power to change the world in different ways. I'm out evangelizing to CEOs, to tech leaders, to policymakers that we need to lean into using AI to be worker friendly, to create widely shared prosperity. It's not enough to have the productivity that I talked about a minute ago.
6:29We also have to have the technology in a way that benefits people broadly and doesn't lead to more concentration of wealth, power and political control. I'm worried that we're not having enough agency in how we use the technology. And that, I think, is the biggest challenge over the coming decade. So are you an optimist or a pessimist when it comes to AI? I'm hearing from you that you are an optimist. You actually feel as if we could benefit from AI if we learn to use it in the right way. Is that correct? You're hearing right. I'll add one word, which is I call myself a mindful optimist, which means that I'm an optimist if we take action.
7:03If we sit back and think, hey, it's all going to work out, let's watch it happen, then that's not going to work. We're going to have to lean in. We're going to have to change our policies. We're going to have to work a lot harder in businesses to get workers involved. We're going to have to work a lot harder as citizens and workers to learn how to use the technology. This is not a time to be passive. But you do agree it's going to replace jobs. I mean, jobs are going to be eliminated because of AI. Again, it depends a lot on how we use the technology. You know, we did a study where we found that, indeed, there are many jobs that are disappearing as technology rolls through the most exposed occupations.
7:37But the more interesting finding in the study, the canaries in the coal mine with Bharat Chandar and Ryu Chen, was that people who were using the technology to augment what they were doing, to complement what they were doing, had growing employment and growing productivity. Whereas those who were using it mainly to automate work had shrinking employment and productivity. So the real lesson is not what AI does to us. It's how we use the technology. Do we use it to complement or to substitute for workers?
8:09Okay, we're going to take a very quick break. And when we come back, where we are already seeing AI impact the workforce and what we can actually do to prepare for a new job market. I'll see you on the other side.
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9:27So I want to talk about this study that you have mentioned, which is canaries in the coal mine, where your team looked at how AI is impacting the economy right now. And you're looking at payroll data from millions of workers. Right. The good news out of this study is that you say you don't see widespread job replacement, as I am arguing, at the moment. But you already see an employment gap for young people entering the workforce in what you call, quote unquote, highly AI exposed occupations. What are highly AI exposed occupations? That's right. We don't see widespread employment loss, but if you rank all the occupations in the economy based on whether AI can help with the tasks.
10:16For instance, AI is great at writing memos or summarizing documents. LLMs cannot help you lift a box. They can't change the plumbing under your sink. For now. For now. For now. So this is what AI can do right now. And if you rank every task, you can go through 19 ,000 tasks in the economy, and we've done this, and basically score them as to whether or not AI can help with that task. Once you do that, you can rank all of the occupations. And if you look at the most exposed occupations, the 20 % that are most exposed, things like call centers, coding, parts of management and sales, then what you see is that there's about 19 % lower employment for people age 22 to 25 in those highly exposed occupations.
10:59And there's higher employment in the occupations that are less exposed and for older workers, and most importantly, for people who are using the technology to complement what they're doing rather than to substitute. I want to stop you for a second because I want to understand what you're saying here. So essentially what you're saying is that there's less people that are going into these types of jobs. That's right. We have looked at ADP data, and the stuff we've looked at so far shows about a 19 % lower employment for those young workers aged 22 to 25 in the highly exposed occupations. How do you know that AI is contributing to the lower employment?
11:32What is the evidence that it's because of actually AI? We don't know that it's causally. We just know that it's correlated. So what we're seeing is that the same occupations that are highly exposed are the ones where we have lower employment. And we looked at other explanations. Could this be remote work? Could this be changes in interest rates? Could it be that there was tech over hiring? And when we assessed each of these alternative explanations, they could not explain it. The one that was most correlated was AI. But I don't have the power to run a big experiment where we say you guys have to use AI and you guys don't.
12:08So this is a broad correlation that we're observing, something we want to watch more closely. So it makes sense that, for instance, entry-level jobs would be more eliminated in the age of moving more towards tech and AI. there is also obviously this idea, as we have already talked about, in kind of these mid-level jobs adapting to using AI in the workplace in various ways. But how are young people, how are entry-level workers supposed to obtain some of the skills that you would get at those entry-level positions if they're just skipping over it because AI is replacing it? This is an incredible concern of mine, is that many of these industries, you know, law firms, investment banks, consulting firms.
12:50There was sort of a pyramid where people would be hired at the base and they would do maybe not the most interesting work, but in the process, they would learn the skills, the tacit knowledge that they would need to be more senior workers. Now, companies aren't hiring those entry-level workers. And so we have a challenge. Where are the mid-level workers going to come later? How are they going to learn those on-the-job tacit skills? Companies are going to have to change the way that they approach this. They're going to have to hire some of them anyways, even if they don't need them for those exact tasks, and maybe invest explicitly in training.
13:22I've talked to some companies that are doing exactly that. And there's going to have to be alternative career paths. I think the government could subsidize some of the training and investment. But it's going to be a change in the social contract about how young people learn some of the skills that previously were learned entirely on the job. What's your advice right now to young people who are wanting to climb this career ladder? You've got these kind of entry-level positions being eliminated. If you could give, you know, three skills that they could be prioritizing right now, what would they be?
13:58Well, the first thing that's, I think, kind of obvious is that AI is rolling through the economy right now, and there are ways to use AI that replace workers, and there's ways to use AI that complement workers. We found that if you're using AI to learn to do new things, to expand the set of things that you're capable of, that you're more employable. And that not only helps the company, but it helps the worker as well. It helps society. So you need to learn into that. But to be a little more abstract, what we're seeing is that there are three kinds of tasks that companies need. They need people who learn how to ask the right questions.
14:32They need people who execute once those questions are to find, and they need people who evaluate what's been done and to make sure it's done correctly. Historically, humans did all three of those steps. Now, AI is getting really good at the middle one, which is executing. And that puts more value, a comparative advantage for humans to ask the right questions and to evaluate. So you need to understand what the customers need, what the opportunities are, and direct fleets of AI agents to do those. And then you need to evaluate them afterwards. That's a formula that's working very well in coding, and it's working more and more in other occupations as well.
15:09What about women? This is something that I've heard a lot in that women are being kind of left behind amidst this AI boom, partially because of the gender gaps in tech, including in AI jobs. One study showing that 6 million women working in administrative and clerical jobs could directly see their work impacted. We're seeing that as well. When you look at the ADP data, that there's kind of a bifurcation. There are some highly exposed occupations that are disproportionately staffed by women, things like call centers, and those are seeing falling employment. But they're also caring professions that are not being affected as much, and women are doing very well in those.
15:47Home health aids, for instance, is a category that has growing employment, and it has more women. So we're seeing sort of a bifurcation of the market. You know, the word on the street is that white-collar workers are going to be affected first. And right now, it's about, like, investing in skilled labor, right? So we're talking about, like, plumbers, carpenters, care workers, like nurses, for instance. They're going to be okay. And if you're headed out into the job market, maybe you need to get, like, become a skilled laborer versus, you know, one of those corporate jobs that's going to be eventually replaced by AI.
16:25And the problem is not everybody can do that skilled labor. I think it's a great point. It's true that there's more opportunity in skilled labor, but that's maybe 10 percent of the workforce. It's not enough to account for all the cognitive work that's going to change. So I think you need to lean into a new set of skills around asking the right questions, around using the technology to do new things in science and marketing and sales and other places that AI can be a complement, can be a tool rather than a substitute for what people are doing. Um, broadly, the strategy has to be to lean into the new jobs rather than try to desperately hang on to the old jobs.
17:06There's a big transformation going on. And the worst thing you can do is try to freeze the labor market the way it is. You got to lean into the transformation. These are often, by the way, kind of lower paid jobs, these skilled laborers, right? So in a way, people are being encouraged to take lower paying jobs because the higher paying jobs are going to be taken over by tech. I mean, that's, that's discouraging for everybody. There are jobs up and down the spectrum that are being affected. Unlike some of the earlier revolutions, this is not disproportionately affecting less skilled workers or lower skilled workers.
17:40It's affecting some very high paid workers as well. I see it actually up and down the labor force, up and down the income distribution, affecting people at all levels, creating opportunities at all levels as well. It's much more diverse than the earlier waves of technology. We have also just recently reported on the World Robot Conference in China. Yeah, that was cool. It was cool, but also scary, right? Amidst this age of AI in which we're already talking about the potential, like, takeover of these entry-level positions from AI. And now you and I are having the discussion of, you know, skilled labor.
18:16And are these robots then going to come in and become the plumbers, right, and become the potential nurses and take over these kind of other jobs that humans are now being encouraged to move towards because of the dawn of AI? You know, technology has always been destroying jobs, has always been creating jobs, and I see that going forward. I do not see mass unemployment. There are parts of jobs that are going to be replaced and robots will be doing parts of them. There's parts of cognitive work that are going to be replaced. Humans still have a lot of advantages over machines, and I think they will for decades to come.
18:50So what I foresee going forward is not mass unemployment so much as mass disruption. And that's scary. That's difficult to make that transition. But even as lots of jobs are being destroyed or transformed, there's other jobs that are being created. And I think we need to constantly be nimbly adjusting to those rather than assuming there's going to be some kind of complete lack of labor out there. What do you think of Bill Gates' suggestion to have human reserved jobs or to phase in AI over time? I think some of that's going to happen anyways, because most of us have a preference for interacting with real humans for certain kinds of things.
19:31You know, I was talking to my son recently, and he loves to play online chess. I said, do you play against other humans or machines? And he said, he looked at me funny. He said, what do you mean? Of course, I play against other humans. It would be no fun to play against machines. But how would he even know that he's playing against other humans or a machine? He did say he thought some of the other people were cheating. Yeah, that was happening too. But there may be room for certified human interactions. I have some artisanal stuff that I value in part because I know it was made by hand. And I think that going forward, there will be a lot of categories of interaction, of work, of relationships, where we really value the fact that there's another human involved on the other side of that.
20:09Obviously, sports is a big category for that and entertainment. So I think there's going to be growing aspects of that in the economy. But even in entertainment, we're seeing glimpses of AI, right? Like in making movies, we've already seen it. In actors, we've already seen it. In the news, in the media, we've seen the use of AI and like the takeover of a job that is supposed to be like reserved for humans. Not to make it personal, by the way. I think that's happening too. No, no. And we use them in higher education as well. So it's diverse. I don't think that there's a section that there's absolutely no AI and it's only human.
20:44You could have an AI professor one day. I have an AI avatar that helps me teach my class. Even your dog is pissed off about this. That's right. My dog is, I don't think it would be the same if I had a mechanical dog, but maybe some people would lean into that. We're going to take a very quick break. And when we come back, what's the plan? Do we have a plan? and how are we going to come out of the AI revolution on top? I'm going to try to get all those questions answered. Stay with us.
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22:37We've talked a lot about kind of the widening wealth gap here in this country and around the world, really. Yes. And when you look at kind of the AI revolution and the potential of like kind of people augmenting their jobs, learning these new skills, like making themselves better at their jobs with AI, you think about the rich and the poor. and how the people that are of less than would be less likely to be able to augment their skills and their jobs and have access to the ability to do that. So could this just kind of create a bigger wealth gap? I mean, as an economist, are you concerned about a widening wealth gap with the dawn of AI?
23:18That's my number one concern is that AI, even as it creates a lot of wealth, could also lead to more concentration of economic bargaining power and political power. And looking forward, I think we need to be ready to address that. It's not enough to have AI that creates better health and wealth and all sorts of wonderful objects that we can buy. It also has to do it in a way that creates shared prosperity. Going forward, there's a real challenge that technology won't do that. It's something that I think we need to focus on as technologists, as managers and as policymakers. So Bill Gates in this manifesto says that there needs to be a plan, but there's not even a plan to actually have a plan.
24:00So what should, for instance, the government be doing? What do they need to do to prepare for the reality of AI in the workforce and to make sure that there's not this widening wealth gap amongst Americans? Bill Gates is right. There's this huge gap between the technology racing ahead, the capabilities are much better. And part of that's because a lot of smart people and literally hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested in that. On the other side, we're investing very little in understanding how to transform the economy, what this means for labor, for productivity, for work. And it begins with better measurement.
24:36And we've created something called the AI economic indicators at Stanford, where you can go and keep track of lots of different metrics of the economy and see how they're changing. That's a first step. And as we understand better how the technology is changing the economy, we're going to be able to implement better policies. But I think there's right now a huge gap. I'm trying to lean into that by studying the economic implications of it. But there's a way underinvestment on that side of the ledger. You mentioned policies. Are there any are there any policies that you're excited about right now that could potentially create like better jobs for the future?
25:12Yeah. I mean, this is something that we've been talking about for a while, but there's we need to help with job retraining and help people transition. We need portable benefits so that people can leave the jobs that are shrinking and move to the new jobs. We need to encourage entrepreneurship that their job is really to invent new products, services, and roles for people. These are all things that we can do to help the economy become more dynamic. If there are fewer workers, if there are fewer people making a heck of a lot of money, making kind of those bigger salaries, there's going to be less tax revenue for the U.S.
25:47government. Again, Bill Gates suggesting creating an AI tax, an AI token tax, and a robot tax. Could that be a way to make things more equitable? I used to be very opposed to that. I'm coming around to seeing that there actually may be a benefit in slowing down some of the faster moving parts of the technology and giving the rest of us a chance to adjust to it more quickly so we don't get this mismatch going forward. Ideally, we'd like to speed up the investment in things like health and longevity and slow down some of the more disruptive parts in other parts of the economy. More broadly, I'd like to see the tax structure less skewed in a way that favors capital versus labor the way it does right now.
26:35Right now, if you're an entrepreneur or a manager, the government will give you more favorable tax treatment if you invest in capital than if you invest in labor. And if we switch that around so that we had more incentive to invest in labor, I think that would be more likely to create widely shared prosperity. So the Industrial Revolution, as we kind of circle back to that, eventually led to the modern middle class. It was not, though, this easy kind of transition. Labor Day started off as this day of protest against horrific working conditions, eventually leading to regulating work days weekends, holiday pay, unemployment benefits, so on and so forth, workers' rights, for instance.
27:13Are there lessons that we can take from the transition then that we can apply now? You described it exactly right, which is that there's this massive technological disruption. And part of the reason that it ultimately turned out good for millions of people is a lot of hard effort by labor leaders, by political leaders, by people protesting, in some cases, even literally shedding blood in order to be able to get some of the benefits we now have of supporting labor in terms of a shorter work week, benefits, health and safety laws, et cetera, or limiting child labor. That would not have happened without a lot of effort by a lot of people.
27:55And it happened over a period of decades of struggle. Going forward, we should not take for granted that the technology is going to create shared prosperity. It's something we have to fight for. It's something we need to work for, I think Labor Day is a good time for us to remember that there's this huge opportunity to make us all better off, but only if we work towards that future. So, you know, the obsessive question when it comes to AI is how long, how long, how long, how long till this, how long till that, how long till all of this changes? So with that, I want to kind of go through a speed round of questions for you in time predictors.
28:25Okay. How long till we have AI co-workers? We already have AI co-workers. I don't know about you, but I'm working with AI agents every single day. When I use Cloud Cowork or ChatGPT or Gemini, they help me with all sorts of tasks that used to require humans. So if your listeners are not already using AI co-workers, I encourage them to fire up their favorite engine and give it a try. Robot co-workers, how long till that? So that depends on the exact definition of robots. Other countries are leaning a lot more into robots in Korea, in China. The United States is a bit behind in terms of robot adoption, but increasingly we're seeing robots work alongside humans on assembly lines.
29:09My friend Rodney Brooks has been investing a lot in developing robots that can work alongside people. And of course, there's subtler kinds of robots like self-driving cars that help people in more and more tasks. When I go to San Francisco, I ride around in a Waymo that I guess is a robot coworker. Four-day work weeks. I mean, if AI is chipping in and making things easier and better for us, we should be able to work less, right? I mean, that would be the good news out of all this. Yes, we should be able to work less. In a couple of weeks, I'm going to Iceland, where my dad was born, and they've implemented a four-day work week.
29:42You know, the work week has been getting shorter and shorter over the past hundred years, maybe not as fast as some of us would have liked, partly because, I mean, some of us have fun working. I kind of enjoy my job. But also there is an opportunity there to formally shorten the work week. And as we get wealthier, a lot of people will decide that they want to spend more time with leisure, more time with their kids, more time traveling and less time on the job. So I expect the work week will keep getting shorter. And by say, as we get wealthier, who are you talking about? Well, you know, America is so much wealthier than it was, you know, 20, 50 or 100 years ago.
30:16Individual living standards are much higher, whether you measure how much housing the average person has, how much food, including how much leisure they have. I know that story isn't widely communicated, but that's one of the reasons that on average, the work week has gotten shorter over the past century. How long before we have higher than 10 % unemployment? I don't think we're going to have a big increase in unemployment due to AI because AI is going to create a lot of jobs as well as destroying jobs. The unemployment might become because of this turbulence and because of our inability to manage their transition as gracefully as we should.
30:51But it won't be because there's no jobs there. When I look around, there's so much work to be done in cleaning the environment and helping with children, helping with health care that really requires humans. And so, you know, until all those needs are gone and until there's nothing left for humans to do, we're going to have plenty of jobs and that's going to be quite a long way off. That is the mindful optimist in you. How How long before we have AI bosses? You know, that's a subtle one. In some ways, we have AI bosses now in the sense that in many ways, they give us instructions on what we should be focusing on.
31:30I turn to, obviously, an AI GPS to tell me which way to turn when I'm driving on the road. And more and more people are turning to AI to help them with all sorts of other kinds of decisions. So it's kind of creeping in. And boss is a pretty negative term for a lot of people, but somebody who gives you instructions on how to, I don't know, fix the plumbing under your sink. I don't know if you'd call that an AI boss, but it is an AI tool that helps tell you what to do next. Our mindful optimist, Eric Brynjolfsson. Thank you, sir. Real pleasure talking to you. That is going to do it for us at Here's the Scoop from NBC News.
32:09I'm Yasmin Basugin. We'll be back tomorrow with whatever the day may bring. And if you like what you heard, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And you can also subscribe to our daily newsletter, The Inside Scoop. It is a deeper dive on the main stories of the day that comes out every weeknight straight to your inbox. You can sign up for The Inside Scoop as part of our paid subscription at NBCNews.com. We'll see you tomorrow.
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Happy Labor Day! The annual celebration of American workers is rooted in the late 1800s, when labor activists pushed for a federal holiday after technology introduced during the Industrial Revolution massively reorganized how people worked. Some say we’re seeing that reorganization again today, with the introduction of artificial intelligence. And just like back then, there are people who say AI will yield huge wins for the economy and prosperity – and others who are ringing alarm bells. Today on the show, Erik Brynjolfsson, professor and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI and director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, helps us understand how the AI revolution is already reshaping the workforce and how you can prepare yourself.
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