Will AI take my job? Ask an economist!

In October 2024, the Indicator from Planet Money hosted a live Q&A event called "Ask an Economist," focused on the single most pressing question about artificial intelligence: Will it take our jobs? The event featured two economists whose work has fundamentally shaped this debate — Daron Acemoglu, a Nobel Prize-winning professor at MIT, and Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at Stanford and director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. The conversation did not aim for a simple yes or no. Instead, it worked through a framework for thinking about what AI actually does to labor markets, what kinds of jobs are most vulnerable, and what policy choices could steer the outcome in one direction or another.

The core framework: automation versus augmentation

The central organizing idea of the discussion was a distinction between two ways AI can be deployed in the workplace. The first is automation — using AI to replace human workers entirely, performing tasks that people used to do. The second is augmentation — using AI to make workers more productive, helping them do their jobs better, faster, or with higher quality.