Class 10
the future of work
1. Introduction
What is the relationship between AI and the economy? What effect will it have ion jobs, and which ones will be affected? What will happen to inequalities and what policies might be effective? In this class, we start looking at the holistic impact that AI is having on people in our societies, and what we can do about it.
2. AI and the Economy
Do you believe that AI will lead to a 7% increase in global annual GDP? Starting from the basics of economic growth, in this video we investigate AI's ability to raise productivity through automation and accelerate production of new ideas, and weight it against other known macroeconomic effects such as Baumol's cost disease and Solow's paradox.
3. AI and Jobs
Will we run out of jobs? In this video, we start from the cases of telephone operators, cashiers and pilots to study the phenomena of displacement of labor, augmentation of labor and increase in labor demand. We will see that in some occasions in the past, technology brought better wages and living conditions, and in some others it didn't.
4. Which jobs will be most affected?
To answer this question, we break each job into a set of tasks and assess whether each one will be augmented, automated or not affected.
📝 Between software engineering and human resource management, which job do you think is more exposed to generative AI?
5. Job Exposure
According to the world economic forum, the potential for augmentation and automation is higher for software engineers than for human resource managers. In this video, we explore other jobs with highest and lowest potential for automation and augmentation, from professors to radiologists.
6. Inequality
What are the key arguments in favor of higher/lower within-country inequality? In this video, we investigate how societal perceptions or difference in local regulations and internet access in different geographies might suggest higher inequalities, and how the ability of LLMs might improve access for people with lower skills. We also explore between-country inequalities and look at some potential policy solutions.
6. Conclusions
Based on all the (sometimes conflicting) studies and perspectives we analyzed in this class, how large do you expect AI's impact on jobs to be? Are you convinced AI will improve or worsen inequalities? And what can we proactively do about it