Federal Reserve Governor Stephen Miran tried to reassure CNBC hosts that artificial intelligence will not cause mass unemployment, in light of Friday’s dismal jobs numbers.
On Friday morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the February Employment Summary showing 92,000 jobs lost and 69,000 more in downward revisions. The bad news came as projections expected an increase of around 50,000 jobs ahead of the report.
“We had a discussion this morning about whether this jobs pred is giving us incremental clues about displacement through technology, right?” said Senior Markets Correspondent Dominic Chu. “Did you see any of that? And if you did, can policy help?”
Miran said he was hesitant to “draw too much inference from any single” prediction.
“It’s the folks who are entering the job market for the first time that are that are bearing the brunt of that, and to me, that’s in a very standard, classic textbook way, exactly the type of unemployment that the Central Bank is equipped to help accommodate with looser monetary policy,” Miran said. “Technology destroys jobs, but it always creates new jobs, too. And that sectoral reallocation from the old jobs to the new jobs is something that monetary policy can accommodate.”
“I guess the debate now is what is the new job if AI is trying to replicate cognitive work in all kinds of areas?” said a skeptical Chu.
“Yeah, so I think that people are really bad at imagining what those are ex-ante,” Miran said, referring to basing job predictions on forecasts rather than actual results.
Miran struggled with the rest of his explanation:
And that’s always been the case throughout the, you know, hundreds of thousands of years of technological progress, you know, for humans — even, and before humans too, as you know — as earlier types of homo — you know, homos just started using tools, right? We have a hard time imagining what the new jobs can be because they don’t exist yet. And as an economist, I’m not really good at as a futurist — I’m not really good at imagining exactly what the new types of jobs will be. But we have thousands of years of technological progress that indicates that we always create new jobs.
Watch the clip above via CNBC.
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