This company adopted AI. Here's what happened to its human workers
Lately, it's felt like technological change has entered warp speed. Companies like OpenAI and Google have unveiled new Artificial Intelligence systems with incredible capabilities, making what once seemed like science fiction an everyday reality. It's an era that is posing big, existential questions for us all, about everything from literally the future of human existence to — more to the focus of Planet Money — the future of human work.
"Things are changing so fast," says Erik Brynjolfsson, a leading, technology-focused economist based at Stanford University.
Back in 2017, Brynjolfsson published a paper in one of the top academic journals, Science, which outlined the kind of work that he believed AI was capable of doing. It was called "What Can Machine Learning Do? Workforce Implications." Now, Brynjolfsson says, "I have to update that paper dramatically given what's happened in the past year or two."
Sure, the current pace of change can feel dizzying and kinda scary. But Brynjolfsson is not catastrophizing. In fact, quite the opposite. He's earned a reputation as a "techno-optimist." And, recently at least, he has a real reason to be optimistic about what AI could mean for the economy.
Last week, Brynjolfsson, together with MIT economists Danielle Li and Lindsey R. Raymond, what is, to the best of our knowledge, the first empirical study of the real-world economic effects of new AI systems. They looked at what happened to a company and its
