AI and the Human Touch

EIG chief economist Adam Ozimek chats with Cardiff Garcia about Adam’s new post, AI and the Economics of the Human Touch.

An excerpt:

Either AI is so useless that we are in the middle of a bubble that’s about to burst and take the economy down with it, or AI is so powerful it’s going to replace us all and devastate the labor market.

The pessimism in speculation about the economic effects of artificial intelligence is often so overwhelming that these opposing concerns can even come from the same person. AI is evolving fast enough that we should not entirely ignore the economic doomers, though it would be nice if they could at least be consistent.

But it is essential to balance the discussion with some optimism. I can see glimmers of hope in a simple fact: There are many jobs and tasks that easily could have been automated by now — the technology to automate them has long existed — and yet we humans continue to do them. The reason is that demand will always exist for certain jobs that offer what I call “the human touch.”

The specific jobs that require the human touch may themselves change or evolve, but I suspect that such jobs will continue to exist long into the future.

Adam and Cardiff discuss the job that inspired Adam’s post, why the Olive Garden represents a hopeful future for work in an age of AI, the perils and promise of AI for caregiving jobs, and how Adam himself plans to prepare for the eventual automation of his daily tasks.

Related links:

• Adam’s post
• Agglomerations homepage (subscribe!)

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