{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"High Variance with Danny Buerkli","title":"What Makes a Job Automatable? – with Bouke Klein Teeselink","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":4013,"description":"Bouke Klein Teeselink — associate professor of economics at King’s College London and chief economist at the AI Objectives Institute — joins Danny Buerkli to ask what actually makes a job automatable. Early evidence suggests that firms and occupations more exposed to AI are already seeing declines in hiring and employment — but Bouke argues that these first effects may be driven as much by uncertainty as by automation.\nThat does not make him an AI skeptic: he expects capabilities to continue advancing at a spectacular pace and takes seriously the prospect that AI could soon outperform even highly skilled researchers.\nThey discuss why traditional research-assistant tasks may already be over, why AI could increase the returns to top talent while eroding the apprenticeship ladder, whether taste and value judgments offer humans any lasting refuge, how reinforcement learning changes which occupations appear most exposed, and why an AI being able to perform a task does not necessarily mean a firm will automate it. They also cover organizational messiness, the threat to outsourcing-led development, the elasticity of demand for different kinds of work, Bouke’s semi-serious plan to run highbrow reading groups if AI takes over his research, and why “pro-worker AI” may be impossible to define.\n\nPapers discussed: \nGenerative AI Exposure and Labour Market Outcomes: Evidence from the United Kingdom, by Bouke Klein Teeselink; \nAI, Automation, and Expertise, by Bouke Klein Teeselink and Daniel Carey; \nWhat Jobs Can AI Learn? Measuring Exposure by Reinforcement Learning, by Philip Moreira Tomei and Bouke Klein Teeselink; \nand Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence, by Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen.\nFurther reading: Sarah O’Connor and John Burn-Murdoch’s FT piece, Could AI make — rather than take — jobs?, featuring Bouke; and Alex Imas’s essay, What will be scarce?.\nRelated High Variance episodes:...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/fSMAUEwHIc0CkfPeb7IjnfXz-xe_0RX3b1uajY9XKeA/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS85MmY1/YjYzMDAyNTExMzA5/ODdjNGNmNDBiNTNk/YWQ4MC5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}