#161 – Michael Webb on whether AI will soon cause job loss, lower incomes, and higher inequality — or the opposite

"Do you remember seeing these photographs of generally women sitting in front of these huge panels and connecting calls, plugging different calls between different numbers? The automated version of that was invented in 1892.

However, the number of human manual operators peaked in 1920 -- 30 years after this. At which point, AT&T is the monopoly provider of this, and they are the largest single employer in America, 30 years after they've invented the complete automation of this thing that they're employing people to do. And the last person who is a manual switcher does not lose their job, as it were: that job doesn't stop existing until I think like 1980.

So it takes 90 years from the invention of full automation to the full adoption of it in a single company that's a monopoly provider. It can do what it wants, basically. And so the question perhaps you might have is why?" — Michael Webb

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews economist Michael Webb of DeepMind, the British Government, and Stanford about how AI progress is going to affect people's jobs and the labour market.

Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.

They cover:

• The jobs most and least exposed to AI
• Whether we’ll we see mass unemployment in the short term
• How long it took other technologies like electricity and computers to have economy-wide effects
• Whether AI will increase or decrease inequality
• Whether AI will lead to explosive economic growth
• What we can we learn from history, and reasons to think this time is different
• Career advice for a world of LLMs
• Why Michael is starting a new org to relieve talent bottlenecks through accelerated learning, and how you can get involved
• Michael's take as a musician on AI-generated music
• And plenty more

If you'd like to work with Michael on his new org to radically accelerate how quickly people acquire expertise in critical cause areas, he's now hiring! Check out Quantum Leap's website.

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type ‘80,000 Hours’ into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript.

Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Milo McGuire and Dominic Armstrong
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez
Transcriptions: Katy Moore