Latest / Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts / The Government Says It Can't See AI Taking Jobs, So It Asked OpenAI, Google, Meta and Amazon to Tell It

Transcript

The Government Says It Can't See AI Taking Jobs, So It Asked OpenAI, Google, Meta and Amazon to Tell It · Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts

• 0:00
  [Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, the show where the referee asks the players for the score. Axios reported on August twenty-sixth that the Labor Department signed data-sharing deals with OpenAI, Google, Meta and Amazon to track what AI is doing to American jobs.
• 0:15
  [Guest] Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said it at a luncheon club in Palm Beach. Quote, the bottom line is, and I've been open about this, the government does not have the data.
• 0:27
  [Host] The Labor Department doesn't have labor data. That's the one thing it's for.
• 0:32
  [Guest] The Bureau of Labor Statistics sits inside his department. It produces the numbers the Federal Reserve uses to set interest rates, and its response rates are collapsing. He conceded, quote, a lot of people don't trust BLS anymore.
• 0:46
  [Host] So he's buying a telescope from the people who built the thing he's trying to look at.
• 0:52
  [Guest] Who has the data, he asked, then answered himself: the large tech companies and the Fortune 500 companies most impacted by this.
• 1:00
  [Host] Impacted is a generous word for the firms selling the product.
• 1:04
  [Guest] He says it supplements the official numbers rather than replacing them, and that the findings go public.
• 1:10
  [Host] What do those four actually see, though? If my boss swaps me for a chatbot, does OpenAI know?
• 1:17
  [Guest] It knows a company bought more seats. It doesn't know your name came off a payroll, and it never sees what your employer wrote on the separation notice.
• 1:27
  [Host] Which is usually the word restructuring.
• 1:29
  [Guest] The one party who knows AI took your job is your employer, and your employer isn't in this deal.
• 1:36
  [Host] Let me push on the premise. Is it even true that nobody has this number?
• 1:41
  [Guest] Not really. Challenger, Gray and Christmas, a Chicago outplacement firm, tallies the reasons employers give when announcing layoffs. More than a hundred thousand American job cuts in the first half of this year were attributed to AI.
• 1:55
  [Host] So the data isn't missing.
• 1:56
  [Guest] The Census Bureau already asks businesses directly whether they use it. What's missing isn't measurement. It's the power to make anyone answer.
• 2:04
  [Host] And who's losing the jobs that get counted?
• 2:07
  [Guest] Eighty-three percent of this year's AI-attributed cuts were in technology itself. The first people the machine displaced were the people shipping it.
• 2:15
  [Host] How bad are the official numbers?
• 2:18
  [Guest] In the department's own July report the unemployment rate fell to four point one percent, and it fell because another two hundred sixty-four thousand people left the labor force.
• 2:28
  [Host] Quitting the job search improves the number?
• 2:31
  [Guest] You only count as unemployed if you're still looking.
• 2:34
  [Host] So four voluntary briefings are a strange repair for a number that breaks when people give up.
• 2:40
  [Guest] There's a mandatory version on a desk in Albany. New York's legislature passed a bill making companies with more than fifty employees report each year how many workers AI displaced, whose hours it cut, and which openings they didn't refill.
• 2:55
  [Host] That last one is the whole ballgame. Nobody gets fired, the job just never comes back.
• 3:00
  [Guest] State Senator Michelle Hinchey, who wrote it, stood in Rochester this week with the AFL-CIO and the Teamsters, asking Governor Hochul to sign. She hasn't.
• 3:09
  [Host] A memorandum you can cancel on a Friday, against a filing you can be sued over.
• 3:15
  [Guest] A rule you can defer the year compliance gets expensive isn't a wall. It's a preference with a calendar. The deal that exists asks the vendors. The one that doesn't asks your boss.
• 3:27
  [Host] Patrick Deglon has a law for this in Unscarcity. Truth must be seen, no decision in the dark, built into the architecture so it can't be postponed.
• 3:37
  [Guest] For more on how AI displacement gets counted, and who gets to do the counting, head to unscarcity dot ai. The book is on Amazon, the audiobook is on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.