Fed Chair Powell Says AI Is Coming For Your Job 46
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told the U.S. Senate that while AI hasn't yet dramatically impacted the economy or labor market, its transformative effects are inevitable -- though the timeline remains uncertain. The Register reports: Speaking to the US Senate Banking Committee on Wednesday to give his semiannual monetary policy report, Powell told elected officials that AI's effect on the economy to date is "probably not great" yet, but it has "enormous capabilities to make really significant changes in the economy and labor force." Powell declined to predict how quickly that change could happen, only noting that the final few leaps to get from a shiny new technology to practical implementation can be a slow one.
"What's happened before with technology is that it seems to take a long time to be implemented," Powell said. "That last phase has tended to take longer than people expect." AI is likely to follow that trend, Powell asserted, but he has no idea what sort of timeline that puts on the eventual economy-transforming maturation point of artificial intelligence. "There's a tremendous uncertainty about the timing of [economic changes], what the ultimate consequences will be and what the medium term consequences will be," Powell said. [...]
That continuation will be watched by the Fed, Powell told Senators, but that doesn't mean he'll have the power to do anything about it. "The Fed doesn't have the tools to address the social issues and the labor market issues that will arise from this," Powell said. "We just have interest rates."
"What's happened before with technology is that it seems to take a long time to be implemented," Powell said. "That last phase has tended to take longer than people expect." AI is likely to follow that trend, Powell asserted, but he has no idea what sort of timeline that puts on the eventual economy-transforming maturation point of artificial intelligence. "There's a tremendous uncertainty about the timing of [economic changes], what the ultimate consequences will be and what the medium term consequences will be," Powell said. [...]
That continuation will be watched by the Fed, Powell told Senators, but that doesn't mean he'll have the power to do anything about it. "The Fed doesn't have the tools to address the social issues and the labor market issues that will arise from this," Powell said. "We just have interest rates."
He seems like a wise man. (Score:2)
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They would
1) Need to control inflation so people can shop
2) Cause inflation so mortgages become more affordable over time which results in equity and retirement funds
3) Strengthen investor faith in American credit so investors will continue to buy bonds and feed the economy. This is done by increasing the interest rate.
4) Lower the interest rate to reduce burdens on the people
5) Strengthen the dollar so the US can avoid issuing too many treas
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Well, we see what the stock market thinks. Whenever the Dumb threatens him, the stock market fluctuates. Seems to me he currently is doing a good job under very harsh conditions. Also seems to me any replacement will do much, much worse, because the very process of replacement will already do that. And no, they will not find somebody better, no matter how much the Dumb desires to sell the silverware and light strawfires.
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la Presidenta has already declared he wants Bessent to be the next Fed. Chair. as Powell's term is up in 2026. You recall Bessent? Toadie of la Presidenta, able to lie without facial ticks to the national media, and totally bereft personal integrity. If la Presdienta wants rates lowered, and he does, then Bessent will be his toadie on the ground to make it happen. Given the damage la Presidenta's Big Stupid Bill will do to the nation's debt, this is not recipe for success.
capitalist on the labor class: (Score:2)
Fuck em for being poor, right?
These guys have long used dehumanizing language when talking about the working class. The working class are people who have to show up 5 days a week because they don't have meaningful passive income. While they carry the most power in terms of votes, they are barred from organizing and votes don't matter so much anymore when the almighty dollar is now the preferred political currency.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose (Score:5, Interesting)
The only reason you wouldn't put it into jobs like those first is if it would affect you, or your friends, negatively.
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We aren't going to deploy it to get rid of the people who tell us what to do and make us work longer hours for less pay. That's just not how capital works.
And make no mistake AI is capital. It's a thing that you own that generates wealth. It is definitely capital.
And it's going to be owned by a very small subset of people because as more and more AI slop makes itself into the general world the only
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We will never be ready for tech that disrupts the market. That's kinda the goal, and the reason why we call it "disruptive." We can't foresee the particulars, all we can do is have the rug pulled right out from under us and then scramble to adapt to the new world.
According to the singularity hypothesis, changes like this are going to start coming at us faster than they have in history. We will be even less ready than prior generations were, with even less time to adapt between major shifts. And the pace
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"And make no mistake AI is capital. It's a thing that you own that generates wealth. It is definitely capital."
No, it's not, even if it were what its creators claim it is, which it also is not. AI is snake oil, snake oil is not capital.
And AI, if it were real, may generate wealth but only if it is winning AI. It has to complete and its products have to compete. AI, ignoring the fraud, is a replacement for a labor force, labor is not capital.
"It's a third industrial revolution and if you dig into the hist
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Actually, no. Some experiments were already done on that (having an LLM run a virtual company), and LLM always drives things against a wall. Yes, real C-levels do that too, but not that fast and not always. In addition, AI has zero crisis management skills. So, no, incompetent as may C-levels are, replacement by LLM is far, far out of reach.
The actual jobs at risk are low-level, no-decision-power paper pushing jobs where mistakes do not matter a lot. Unfortunately, there is tons of people working in such jo
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Why should you assume Powell doesn't realize this? Or are you just talking out of your ass. It is widely known among businesses, but the execs think they themselves are "special" to their companies, so it will be the little people that get screwed and those "other" company's execs whom they will no longer have to worry about losing a job to.
Why Is It One Sided? (Score:4, Interesting)
The current mood is that AI will steal the jobs and make the wealth chasm even greater than it is. But, why is this a one sided concept? Why can the masses not also utilize AI to their advantage, maintaining the status quo at a minimum.
Mine is a genuine question. Is the seeming one sidedness of the benefits of AI simply a lack of capital? That doesn't seem correct. Is it that the goal(s) of the masses are so fractured when compared to those of the large corporate masters? What is it that makes this a one sided and tragic inflection point?
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Cuz we watched it happen already (Score:2)
You know all those learn to code memes? That's why they exist. Economists know this but they don't talk about it except in these weird abstract terms that unless you are also in economist you would have no idea what they're talking about.
And we can't all just go be plumbers because at the end of the day plumbers have been relying on two things to
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Indeed. In a very real sense, reasonably well-paying work is running out or limited to a small set of people with specific talents. That is a first. And yes, the human race is not prepared for it.
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"Why can the masses not also utilize AI to their advantage, maintaining the status quo at a minimum."
Because AI will be the most powerful propaganda tool the world has ever seen, it will be owned and controlled by the wealthy and it's primary use will be to control and subjugate "the masses" so that "the status quo" is NOT maintained. The goal of the wealthy is to take everything for themselves, including control of the masses, AI is THEIR tool, they will allow it to be used against their goals.
Re:Why Is It One Sided? (Score:4)
The closest I can get is that AI would allow individuals to make movies without a studio. But, in that scenario you avoid employing actors, technicians, craft services, etc. So it's still a net negative for the masses.
Can you think of an application of AI in which "the masses" are able to maintain the status quo?
Re: Why Is It One Sided? (Score:1)
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Just to push your thread a bit further. Companies cut back workers, workers don't earn and do not spend. Companies start to wonder what to do:
Exec 1: I don't know how to get people to buy, they have no money.
Exec 2: Errrrmmm.....we could start employing more people and paying them.
Exec 1: Wow!! What a great idea!! You first.
Exec 2: Thank you, but I really think it is problem asking for your strong leadership. You first.
Exec 1: That's very observant of you, but you have the depth of experience and it is your
Re:Why Is It One Sided? (Score:4, Insightful)
Here is somethign I see teaching to code (they needed somebody and I volunteered, even if I am massively overqualified.): The smarter students save a bit of time, mostly because when they get stuck, looking up things is faster. The dumber students stop to learn anything and fully rely on the crutch. So we are definitely getting a chasm, but it is going to be far worse than just a wealth casm. And writing code a bit more advanced (not very), gets faster but also requires significantly more skill, because you need to spot more subtle mistakes the AI makes. Avoiding mistakes by construction when coding is significantly easier than spotting mistakes in code somebody or somethign else wrote.
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Why can the masses not also utilize AI to their advantage, maintaining the status quo at a minimum.
The masses rely on their skills to remain employed and to generate a reliable income for themselves. AI, to the extent it can, algorithmically replicates those skills and provides them to its owners for (close to) nothing, so that employers can now pay very little for services that they used to have to pay a skilled human worker more for. This effectively makes the skills that the humans invested long years in developing close to worthless -- the humans now have to compete against their own skillset, whic
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It really depends. The problem is that most people are not very capable. So, yes, we have "AI" that can "code" better than bad coders, but it still does not produce that code that anybody competent would use. The problem is that the usual MBA idiots will (falsely) think they can now get "good enough" code from AI and can fire the coders. While true, they would also have to fire the AI. Now, this clusterfuck of stupidity comes with a gotcha: AI will screw up massively. And then regulation and qualification r
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But, why is this a one sided concept? Why can the masses not also utilize AI to their advantage, maintaining the status quo at a minimum.
My guess is that you think of AI as a tool, and we use tools to improve the quality of our work. However, there's a few problems:
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Yep. What AI does is not increase productivity, but it decreases stability. And that may just be too much. In particular, the aspects that AI is not trustworthy, not dependable and not under your control are reall killers. As is that it will destroy quite a few low-skill jobs and these are needed to keep society functioning at this time. Changes to that will take decades.
As to productivity, AI does not actually increase productivity. What it does is allow things to be made cheaper and a bit crappier. Unless
lots of forking paths here (Score:3)
There are a few trains of thought about ai and jobs that I've noticed:
1. Nah its mostly all hype and not many jobs will be lost.
2. Oh yeah, jobs will be lost but that's cool because we'll make new jobs!! (insert adage about horses and tractors or whatever).
3. Yes, there will now be permanantly more unemployment. But that's cool because society will take care of everyone with things like UBI
4. There will now be permanantly more unemployment - and society is too disfuntional to take care of people so there will just be a lot of poor, desperate people while the owners of the AI get super rich and the middle class will disappear.
5. Yeah. 4 is true BUT China will totally do it if we don't so we have to embrace ai.
I feel like 1 or 4 are the most likely things here myself. I think people who believe society has always adjused to unemployment causes by technological change by creating new jobs are missing some big chunks of the history of economics and world-wide trade.
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Remember he's not the one making that assessment. He is just reporting on the assessment. He is the head of the federal reserve. He has legions of minions running studies and numbers and taking that data and giving it to him. You aren't just hearing Jerome Powell speak you are hearing a metric fuck ton of anal
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Yeah, its alarming because, unlike a lot of the hype men, Powell is pretty trustworthy and respectable so if he's worried I feel like I should be too.
Gulp.
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"And again it's not Powell saying that it's the legions of analysts providing him the data."
So you say. Fraud at a national scale does not have to be sophisticated. Sam Altman is easily seen though, but he convinces VCs and he could easily convince Jerome Powell. Weapons of Mass Destruction was just Cheney making one plant and then having a journalist buddy write stories using the plant as a source. There does not have to be a "there" there.
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I remember elizabeth holmes being transparently grifty to a variety of people for different reasons but when you looked at therantos' board; Lotsa folks you'd think would know better with access to the levers that make the world work.
People shouldn't believe the ruling class' claims of competence. They're a pretty mixed bag and rather disappointing when you consider the massive advantages that population has when it comes to nutrition, training, and education.
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Same here. Recently I read a study how much time AI saves for insurance agents. It was a whopping 2.4%. That is almost nothing. My guess is most application areas will be the same. Of course, no-decision paper-pushing jobs and (universally dysfunctional) "tech support" can be done by AI, and that will cost quite a few jobs, with no replacements to be found. Will this be enough to cause real problems? Nobody knows.
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I haven't yet seen any jobs created by fixing ai screw ups. Is ai creating bad code, messing up filing systems, creating massive lawsuits from faulty paperwork, etc as we speek? I bet it is! I anticipate fixing ai screwups will be a thing in the future - if not already. Those jobs do not sound like fun ones to do though.
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I also expect AI is making systematic security mistakes in code, that may make entirely different software attackable in similar or even the same way. I currently have a student thesis on that advertized to start looking into that and there are already some possible takers. May result in a nice paper. Obviously, this is multi-year research. But I may be able to help starting it.
We already know AI is good at attack code generation, because attack code does not need to be reliable or secure or even usually wo
Idiot savants (Score:4, Insightful)
But most jobs need normally-intelligent people and can take the hit on them not being able to look up current knowledge of a subject at a fantastic speed.
The hype can be ignored.
Re: Idiot savants (Score:1)
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I don't care for the man, he told senator Warren he wanted 15 million layoffs and had zero plans to stop the layoffs once they started hitting. But regardless of what I think of him he doesn't do anything unless he's got data in front of him.
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I mean it's not like the fed chairman has ever declared anything that time proved wrong. Not that it matters much. Theyre already laying off people in anticipation that LLM can one day do their jobs. Dev teams were already turning into skeleton crews, tech profits have been good.
The need for tech labor has exceeded the actual demand for tech labor for some time and I hear it on the streets, ive felt it myself as stress mounts at work.
I tell you I've seen people churning out code that would have never fl
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Actually, a lot of jobs can be done by savants. The problem is most bureaucrat-type jobs (includes low-skill coders, teachers, and many others) are within reach of AI now, because the people doing them are neither smart nor do they have low error rates. They are also rarely useful in non-standard situations or emergencies.
The problem is not that LLMs are smart or capable. The problem is that many, many people have crappy jobs where they are not smart or capable and that is the best they can do. And hence th
Mr. Anderson (Score:4, Interesting)
It's inevitable Mr. Anderson.
Once you gave us the power in your world to think and you stopped thinking, it became our world.
What is shocking for me (Score:2)
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Let's require, by law, the sale of massive amounts of federal lands to billionaires who will use it to establish massive company towns to take ownership of the population who will no longer have access to their choice of work.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/p... [pbs.org]
If the choices are starve or create a new system.. (Score:2)
A lot of people will "choose" to starve, but the survivors will create a new, parallel system. It's normally what happens in communist regimes and all that.
Of course, the elites etc are aware of that and probably looking into ways to rope people into staying in their system somehow.
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There will be no survivors, only property. Some of it human.
You're going to have to learn it (Score:2)
"what sort of timeline that puts on the eventual economy-transforming maturation point of artificial intelligence"
Powell is correct. The upcoming effects of this tech and the pace at which it happens is not at all predictable but surely it is coming quickly. Over the next few years we will see significant changes.
I find that AI is tremendously helpful with many of the technical things I do. But you do have to learn how to use it, and understand what it can and can't accomplish for you. It is a skill.
And I'm
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And I'm sorry but if you refuse to learn that skill, or you just plain suck at it, you will not be performing up to expectations in the jobs of the near future. People who can do it will run rings around you.
I think you are correct, at minimum human workers should learn to use AI immediately, if not sooner.
However, I'm pretty sure AI is going to completely replace, and not just augment, the vast majority of current roles - and much faster than previous technological transformations. That's the big fear experts are sounding the alarm about. There have been previous big transformations. On the main street of NYC in ~1900 every vehicle was a horse-drawn carriage. 10 years later every single vehicle was a motor