We have a new @camo_hku paper out (with Jin Li and @chang_sun_econ): "Toward a Bad Job Economy: AI Adoption, Agency Costs, and Job Design." We show that AI may not just replace jobs; it may make the jobs that remain worse.

Yes, and: improving myself (and developing unique skills and knowledge) is what will allow me to work with the machines productively, rather than being replaced. The goal of ed cannot be to accept substituability. It must be to learn how to adapt so we are AI-complementary.

Related to this paper by @LeonMusolff and coauthors: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…

Artfully written as always and I love seeing more positive pro-AI stuff out there, but I somewhat disagree with @danshipper on the conclusions of this (maybe dangerous to disagree publicly with my CEO, but I know he'll be cool with it :-). I don't expect humans to always be in the driving seat BUT I am also optimistic like Dan is, because I don't think machines overtaking us will be that bad. I would call my position something like "jagged free lunch": - machines will be superhuman at some things, subhuman at others - to the extent machines are better than us at some things it's because the environment they "live in" rewards those things i.e. math benchmarks - machines will eventually be capable of beating humans at everything BUT only at a cost surpassing human salaries and latency - this is because it will cost so much and take so much time to evaluate fuzzy tasks with machines that it will be quicker and cheaper to use human intuition / experience - there are no free lunches in evolution, given a fixed energy raw material input humans already make mostly the right tradeoffs in intelligence vs heuristics Essentially it costs so much to brute force all the available options with compute to simulate reality that it is irreducibly cheaper to just "live in" reality and let market forces / physics 'teach' you the right heuristics. One day robots will live here with us but will be subject to the same scaling laws biological intelligence is.

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#CAMO Quote💬 Firms are intentionally stripping away judgment and responsibility to settle for "good enough" standardized output. The real threat isn't ＃AI taking your job. 𝗜𝘁'𝘀 𝗔𝗜 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗷𝗼𝗯 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝘀𝗲. Read full paper : camo.hku.hk/toward-a-bad-job…

Most of the debate on causality in economics is misplaced. The real divide is not RCTs versus non-RCTs. It is between two different questions: “what is the effect of X on Y?” and “what are the causes of Y?” Once mechanisms, interactions, and general equilibrium matter, theory is not optional. You are identifying a model, not just a total effect. sebastiangaliani.substack.co…

Latest data show "immediate, sizable, and persistent decrease in the level of early career (22-24 year old) hires" from AI after controlling for COVID stimulus, ZIRP and other macro factors: "... historical decomposition suggests that up to 1/4 of relative early career employment declines through 2025q2 may be attributable to monetary policy shocks through 2023, but the analysis does not find evidence that these shocks can explain the rapid decline in hires at the most AI-exposed firms in comparison to others" from @LeeCTucker, @UScensusbureau economist publishing independently