For the last four decades, technology has been mostly a force for greater inequality and a shrinking middle class. But new empirical evidence suggests that the age of AI could be different. We speak to MIT's David Autor, one of the greatest labor economists in the world, who envisions a future where we use AI to make a wider array of workers much better at a whole range of jobs and help rebuild the middle class. This episode was produced by Dave Blanchard and edited by Molly Messick. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Katherine Silva. Jess Jiang is Planet Money's acting executive producer. Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy
This is Planet Money from NPR.
It's been about six months since chat GPT was released to the public.
And basically, from the moment that happened, it felt like this seismic shift, because.
All of a sudden, people everywhere realized just how powerful artificial intelligence already is.
They began using this AI chatbot to do all sorts of things, to write raps, to take the bar exam, to identify bugs in computer code and fix them.
I mean, all that stuff is pretty cool.
But at the same time, there's been all this doom and gloom about AI.
Will it take our jobs?
Will it derail democracy?
Will it kill us all?
And these aren't, like, off the wall questions, like, serious people are asking these questions right now.
Yeah, it's kind of easy to fall into this, like, doom spiral these days.
But then a couple weeks ago, I saw something that gave me, like, this little glimmer of hope.
It was a study that looked at this customer service department of a big software company, and they started using chat GPT to help workers get better at their jobs.
And interestingly enough, it worked like it made the less skilled workers at this company much more productive.
And at the same time, it didn't do much for workers at the top.
So basically, AI narrowed the productivity gap between lower skilled workers and workers with more skills.
And, Greg, I think it's fair to say you read a lot of economic.
Studies, probably too many.
And yet you have been telling me, you've been telling all of us, that this finding felt really big to you because it's different from how we usually understand the way technology affects workers.