The Daily

Quote · The Daily

What A.I. Is Actually Doing to the Economy

Explore episode Jul 27, 2026

If AI were already wiping out huge swaths of jobs, we would see that in our data. And so whatever effect it's having, it's subtle right now.

Ben Castleman

What A.I. Is Actually Doing to the Econ…

Similar quotes

Shares of Chinese chipmaker CxMT soared in their Shanghai trading debut, making it the most valuable China-listed company.

NPR Host

NPR News: 07-27-2026 7AM EDT

Now is not the time to regulate because we don't know where it's heading. So all you're going to do is kneecap innovation.

Steven Sinofsky

Steven Sinofsky: AI Doesn't Need New Ru…

When Anthropic says the best way to hurt China is to curtail open source, what that means is the best way to help Anthropic is to curtail our open source competitor, whether it's from China or the United States. And that's just, that is kind of un-American.

Steven Sinofsky

Steven Sinofsky: AI Doesn't Need New Ru…

The truth is no one knows the future. So what those assumptions mean are we should regulate this based on our own personal predictions of the future. But the history of being right about those predictions is pretty limited. And so we should be really careful about that because those are all self-serving.

Steven Sinofsky

Steven Sinofsky: AI Doesn't Need New Ru…

You can't have AI is both the most intelligent thing in the world and it generates gibberish hallucinations and the answers are wrong and you can't rely on it. Like those both can't be true at the same time.

Steven Sinofsky

Steven Sinofsky: AI Doesn't Need New Ru…

If it happens in a way that looks more like that China shock example, where we see whole categories of jobs wiped out more or less overnight, where it's not clear what direction you should go in because all the other careers you can imagine are also getting wiped out — that is the kind of disruption that could be really painful, not just for some individual workers, but for the economy as a whole.

Ben Castleman

What A.I. Is Actually Doing to the Econ…

We may right now still be in this scoop part of the J where actually, if anything, it may be making us less productive in the moment, even though it will have this big positive effect on our productivity and then maybe ultimately on our jobs down the road.

Ben Castleman

What A.I. Is Actually Doing to the Econ…

We just actually a few days ago got a statement that was signed by around 200 economists in which they warn that this could be an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter period of time.

Ben Castleman

What A.I. Is Actually Doing to the Econ…

Our economic data really wasn't designed and isn't up to capturing a change that's happening this rapidly in anything close to real time.

Ben Castleman

What A.I. Is Actually Doing to the Econ…

Up next:

0:00