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Asked Wednesday about how the AI boom is impacting the US economy, Fed Chair Jay Powell offered a classic Powell response, nodding at several interesting possibilities and offering a conclusion that amounted to “hard to say.”
“So everyone of course is watching AI and the deployment and, you know, trying to understand exactly what’s happening. And there’s a wide range of possibilities,” Powell said.
“Anyone who uses [AI is] amazed at what it can accomplish, right?” Powell said. “So every technological wave will eliminate some jobs and create other jobs. And it’s always been the case if you look back, wave after wave after wave, there will be some disruption. But ultimately technology increases productivity, which is the basis for rising wages.
“And we may in any case see, in the short term, jobs that are being eliminated by the capabilities of AI…So how to think about it in in macroeconomic terms, it’s very hard. You know, we we can look at the aggregate data. We can analyze, for example, [that] there is some connection, it appears, between the low hiring rate for recent college grads and AI. But it’s not the main or only driver.
“You hear large companies saying, many of them saying, that they either won’t be hiring for some time or that they’re hiring less, or that they’re laying people off. And they tend to refer to AI when they when they do that. So we’re all watching and learning and it could it could certainly have pretty significant effects on the economy, the workforce, and our society. We don’t really have the tools to address the concerns that may arise, but we have a lot of people who focus on analyzing it, and try to understand what the macroeconomic implications are, which which is our job.”