ouw, we have this convo a lot #1501568, #1517976, #1485162

"You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." -- Robert Solow, 1987"You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." -- Robert Solow, 1987

Ben Casselman for the NYT, laying out the pros and the cons

Pretty much everyone agrees that artificial intelligence has the potential to reshape the economy in the coming decades. But no one is sure what effect the technology is having right now.
According to some measures, A.I. is contributing to high unemployment rates among new graduates and might already have destroyed tens of thousands of jobs. Other sources suggest companies might actually be adding workers as a result of the technology.

sooo, AI good/bad/irrelevant/all-encompassing?

A.I. might be contributing to the U.S. inflation problem, or part of the solution to it. It might be responsible for a recent pickup in productivity growth, or might be playing virtually no role — or the productivity boom itself might be a mirage.
Researchers can’t even agree on basic questions like how many companies are using A.I. or which workers are most vulnerable to the disruptions it could cause.

"The conflicting signals partly reflect the challenge of detecting economic shifts in real time.""The conflicting signals partly reflect the challenge of detecting economic shifts in real time."

gov stats are bad plus they're backward-looking. Who knows.

What makes A.I. different is the speed of its spread through the economy. It has taken less than fours years for generative A.I. to go from a novelty useful mostly for writing limericks to a powerful tool adopted by the world’s largest corporations. Economists have become convinced that the technology will have profound implications for workers and the economy, even as they disagree about what those implications will be.

Good luck trying to figure out its exact effect on the workforce.

Policymakers aren’t flying completely blind. Since 2023, the Census Bureau has asked companies about their A.I. use in a biweekly survey.

oh, that's gonna cut it, certainly. We know from Cowen's book this spring (#1471628, #1488323) that all-purpose tech and general labor-saving productivity are ambiguous on their economic effect: more or less, Jevons' paradox or not

Economists can use those measures to figure out whether the most exposed occupations are adding jobs more slowly, for example, or experiencing different rates of wage growth.

...we shall see.

"The trouble is that the sources often tell confusing or contradictory stories""The trouble is that the sources often tell confusing or contradictory stories"

Part of the problem is that the best-known measures of the economy were developed for an era before personal computers and the internet, let alone A.I. The monthly jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example, provides breakdowns of job growth in manufacturing, retail and construction, but not in technology, which has adopted A.I. tools most aggressively.

Yeah, us economist twats are painfully aware -.- Solow and Kuznets are(n't?) our friends.
You'll also be shocked to learn that a former BLS bureaucrat is upset about the funding cuts (= worse service).

Our friend, economist and productivity researcher Erik Brynjolfsson:

That data shows that entry-level jobs have declined sharply in the most A.I.-exposed sectors since ChatGPT debuted in 2022. Erik Brynjolfsson, the lab’s director, called the trend a canary in the coal mine for A.I.-driven job losses. “I think it’s comparable to the Industrial Revolution in terms of how it’s going to affect the labor market,” Mr. Brynjolfsson said. “I wish the federal government was investing more in it.

Yeah, sexy comment.

TLDR: AI helping or hurting jobs? Who can tell?!TLDR: AI helping or hurting jobs? Who can tell?!

“What the data can almost never tell us is where we’re going to be in five to 10 years,” said Ms. McEntarfer, the former commissioner of labor statistics. “People are looking to data to answer that question, and it’s just too difficult.”

archive: https://archive.md/PaFz9